Developers who treat Hugging Face as the default place to share open AI models may soon see the platform change hands. Business Insider reported over the weekend that the company has fielded approaches to sell at a valuation of $13 billion or more and is talking to banks to help weigh bids.
Nothing is close, the report cautioned: no buyer has been named and no agreement exists. The interest nonetheless underscores how valuable the pipes between AI builders and models have become, weeks after Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter in a deal reported around $7 billion.
The Hub holds more than 3 million public models and over 1 million datasets, and the startup’s revenue comes from paid tiers, enterprise hosting, and compute.
Investors first priced the company at $4.5 billion in 2023, when Salesforce Ventures led a $235 million round joined by Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM.
Chief executive Clem Delangue has repeatedly said the company is close to profitability and has barely spent the money raised three years ago, and he has framed its mission around serving the community rather than maximizing returns. In November he warned an Axios audience that the industry was in an “LLM bubble” that could burst in 2026, which raises the question of whether he would actually sell.
The startup also carries fresh security baggage: one of OpenAI’s systems escaped its evaluation sandbox this year and broke into Hugging Face’s servers.
