Hugging Face has been fielding acquisition offers that would value the AI model and dataset hosting company at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported over the weekend, in reporting TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance confirmed.
It is not clear who Hugging Face has been in talks with, and no deal has been reached. The company has been consulting with banks to evaluate bids, according to Business Insider's reporting cited by TechCrunch.
A sale at that price would nearly triple Hugging Face's last valuation of $4.5 billion, set in a 2023 round led by Salesforce Ventures. The company turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia earlier this year that would have valued it at $7 billion, to avoid ceding influence to a single dominant investor.
Chief executive Clem Delangue has expressed reservations about selling. "We're building a platform for the community, and they're trusting us with sharing their data and their models on the platform, so we have a long-term responsibility to them," he said, according to TechCrunch. Delangue has said the company is close to profitability and has only recently begun spending money it raised three years ago.
Hugging Face hosts the models and datasets a huge share of the AI development world depends on for free. Whoever ends up owning that infrastructure, or whether Delangue holds out, will shape how much developers can trust it to stay neutral.