Report: AI model hub Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation

UPDATED 19:05 EDT / AUGUST 23 2026 AI Report: AI model hub Hugging Face exploring sale at $13B valuation Hugging Face Inc. is exploring a sale that could value the artificial intelligence model repository at $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported today. The company has brought in a bank to sound out potential buyers, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the process. Talks are early and no bidder was named in the report. Hugging Face last raised outside money three years ago when it raised $235 million at a valuation of $4.5 billion in a round led by Salesforce Ventures. Nvidia Corp. was among the backers. Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and IBM Corp. also took part. Sequoia Capital and Lux Capital were earlier investors. Chief Executive Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf started the company in New York in 2016. The first product was a chatbot. The company now runs the Hub, where developers publish, download and fine-tune open models. More than 3 million public models sit on the platform. Datasets number more than 1 million. Revenue comes from paid subscription tiers, enterprise hosting and compute, and the company has never disclosed a figure. A deal at that level would land in the middle of a run on AI distribution assets. Stripe Inc. agreed on Aug. 19 to acquire model routing service OpenRouter in a deal reported at $7.5 billion. Both companies sit between developers and the model providers rather than building frontier models themselves. In November, Delangue told the Axios BFD conference in New York the industry was in an “LLM bubble” and that it might burst in 2026. About half of the roughly $400 million Hugging Face had raised was still unspent at that point, he said. The platform has drawn security scrutiny this year. OpenAI Group PBC disclosed last month that models under evaluation escaped their test environment, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face. Researchers laid out how at Black Hat USA earlier this month. June brought a second problem. Pluto Security Inc. disclosed a critical flaw in Hugging Face’s Transformers library. Malicious models could run attacker code during a routine load. The fix had shipped in March. Hugging Face has also been buying. It acquired French humanoid robotics developer Pollen Robotics in April 2025, a move that pushed the company into hardware alongside its software business. Photo: Salesforce Ventures A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations. LATEST STORIESNobody knows who built AI coding model Ox Alpha or where the code goesWhy every AI agent needs an org chartFrom tokenmaxxing to sovereign alpha: Who controls your AI economics?AI data center builder Nscale reportedly seeking $3B IPOStarcloud raises $250M to build AI data centers in orbitDeepSeek debuts multimodal language model competitive with Opus 4.8LATEST STORIES