NVIDIA went into the 2023 round with google, amazon, amd, intel, qualcomm, ibm and salesforce.
since then it put train on dgx cloud on the site, then its nim inference containers, then training cluster as a service on top of the lepton marketplace it bought in april 2025.
by mid 2025 nvidia owned the compute under hugging face and the containers on it. it didn't own hugging face.
hugging face is doing about $150m a year now, so at $12.9bn nvidia is paying 86x revenue.
-- the 2023 round was 129x revenue when the estimates were ~$35m for that year.
-- if they were near $100m when they said no, nvidia offered 70x revenue for a minority stake and is now paying 86x for the whole company.
-- so it's paying 23% more per dollar to own it outright than it offered for a stake with no say.
i don't think anyone else was bidding.
hugging face runs a router called inference providers.
-- every request goes to one of 18 partners, and by default it goes to whoever is fastest, meaning most tokens per second.
-- cerebras, groq and sambanova are on that list and none of them run nvidia chips, so when one of them is fastest for a model, that's where the request goes.
-- hugging face also writes optimum-amd and optimum-neuron, so the same models run on amd and trainium without cuda, and amd and amazon are on the cap table.
-- hugging face calls that zero vendor lock-in, and a $500m minority holder (what nvidia offered in late 2025) can't change a routing default.
chinese models were 41% of downloads on hugging face last year, more than american ones. there are more than 113,000 models built off qwen on the site, and qwen had passed a billion downloads by march. nvidia can't sell its top chips into china.
revenue went from about $100m a year in june to $150m in august and that's paid compute, storage and subscriptions.
i'd watch whether AMD, Amazon & Google take their 3x and leave, and whether the fastest default is still there once the deal goes through.
and whether qwen and deepseek keep releasing on a site owned by the company whose top chips they can't buy.
