Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, for about $12.9 billion. If the deal actually goes through, reports say Kevin Durant’s $250,000 investment could end up being worth more than $60 million.
Durant made the investment through Thirty Five Ventures alongside Rich Kleiman, putting $100,000 into Hugging Face’s 2018 seed round and another $150,000 into its 2019 Series A. That was well before Hugging Face went from a teen chatbot app to something closer to a GitHub for AI, with millions of machine-learning models and datasets hosted on the platform.
The more interesting part is why Nvidia wants it. Hugging Face sits right in the middle of how developers find models, share them, fine-tune them, and put them into use, which would give Nvidia a much deeper foothold beyond chips and cloud infrastructure.
There’s a catch, though. Hugging Face works across hardware from Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Intel, and some analysts have raised questions about whether it could stay neutral under Nvidia ownership, or whether that would clash with Hugging Face’s open-source culture.
The reported price is a huge leap from Hugging Face’s $4.5 billion valuation in 2023 and its roughly $150 million in annualized revenue. Reports also say the company previously turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation, and that Microsoft had shown interest too.
If you follow AI or startup investing, this one deserves attention. But for now, neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has confirmed the deal, and the claims that European employees got less equity still haven’t been backed up.
