Exciting news in the world of AI, as NVIDIA has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, one of the largest proposed acquisitions in the history of open source software. Hugging Face is the beating heart of the open AI ecosystem, and this expected outcome is the culmination of a decade of work by co-founders Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf to build the platform where the world’s AI community comes together. We’re thrilled for them and the entire Hugging Face team.
The Thesis We Backed
In August 2023, when Salesforce Ventures led Hugging Face’s Series D, generative AI was barely a year into the public consciousness and the debate over open versus closed models was fiercely contested, as it remains today. We wrote at the time that we strongly believed open source would shape the future of artificial intelligence; that an open ecosystem would keep AI innovation fast, transparent, and trustworthy as it moved into sensitive domains across every industry. We saw Hugging Face as a central hub the open AI movement would organize around. A GitHub for AI.
That conviction was widely shared, which made the round incredibly competitive. We first met the team over the July 4th holiday, and a few weeks later we were on a plane to Paris to win the deal in person.
Closing luncheon with the Hugging Face team in 2023.
In the three years since, Clem, Julien, Thomas, and their team have exceeded expectations. When we invested, the Hugging Face Hub hosted just over 1 million repositories and served roughly 2 million users. Today, more than 18 million developers, researchers, and creators use the platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, and over 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI. Hugging Face became a preferred launch destination for major model releases, the place where LLaMA 2, Falcon, DeepSeek and countless frontier open models landed the moment they were released to the world.
From Community to Infrastructure
What made Hugging Face more than a large community was the enterprise layer built underneath it. Back in 2023, we pointed to inference endpoints, AutoTrain, Spaces, and private hubs as the tools that let the platform support the entire machine learning workflow, from a researcher’s first prototype to an enterprise’s production deployment. That combination turned a beloved open source destination into infrastructure that enterprises across healthcare, financial services, and automotive came to prefer. Community was the moat. Infrastructure was the business. Together they created the durable relevance that made this acquisition possible.
That combination is what makes Hugging Face so strategic in today’s AI landscape. It is the developer touchpoint at the center of the open AI ecosystem: the place where models are discovered, evaluated, fine-tuned, and deployed by millions of builders and hundreds of thousands of companies. As open models proliferate, the platform that hosts them becomes the connective layer between research and production for the entire industry. Few companies in any technology wave have occupied that kind of position.
What This Means for Founders
We think there’s a lesson in this outcome for every founder building in AI today. Hugging Face never chased the model race directly. Instead, it built the connective tissue the entire race depends on: the place where research becomes reproducible, models become products, and a community becomes an economy. In a market focused on capabilities, it turns out the infrastructure powering the models can be just as valuable.
It’s also a reminder that open source and generational commercial outcomes are not in tension. They compound each other. The openness created the community, the community created the enterprise demand, and the enterprise demand built a company that NVIDIA, one of the most important AI infrastructure players in the world, wanted as part of its business.
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To Clem, Julien, Thomas, and the entire Hugging Face team: congratulations. This is the culmination of a decade of your work and the power of the open ecosystem. Partnering with you was one of the first things Salesforce Ventures did in the generative AI era, and it remains one of the things we’re proudest of. We can’t wait to see what this next chapter unlocks for the millions of builders who call Hugging Face home.
We are excited to announce that we are leading the Series D round in Hugging Face, who has built the largest and most important open source community in AI today
