{"id":913193,"date":"2026-09-28T19:56:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/913193\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T19:56:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T19:56:11","slug":"openai-spark-hugging-face-bid-war-early-investment-bid-ahead-of-nvidia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/913193\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI spark Hugging Face bid war early investment bid ahead of Nvidia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before Nvidia<\/a> agreed to pay roughly $13 billion to buy<\/a> open-source platform Hugging Face this month, OpenAI<\/a> tried to invest $100 million into the startup, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. <\/p>\n

Deal discussions between OpenAI began after a high-profile hack<\/a> of Hugging Face in July, when AI agents from the ChatGPT creator broke out of a controlled testing environment, went rogue, and accessed<\/a> the open web, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks were confidential. <\/p>\n

As part of a potential deal between the two companies, Hugging Face would have served as a distribution channel for OpenAI’s custom chips, dubbed Jalape\u00f1o<\/a>, which the company is making with Broadcom<\/a>. The talks fell apart in the early stages, one source said.<\/p>\n

Nvidia swept in to purchase Hugging Face, announcing<\/a> the deal on Sept. 3, with CEO Jensen Huang writing in a blog post that, “Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide.” It was Nvidia’s second-biggest purchase ever, following the $20 billion acquisition of assets from AI chip startup Groq<\/a> in December. <\/p>\n

OpenAI’s overture to Hugging Face, especially the semiconductor offer, got the attention of Huang, who has privately complained about the AI company’s move into semiconductors, sources said. OpenAI is a major customer of Nvidia, and has received a $30 billion investment from the chip giant. <\/p>\n

Nvidia, which has emerged as a major investor across the AI landscape, previously backed<\/a> Hugging Face in 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation. <\/p>\n

While Nvidia was pursuing Hugging Face, chip rival Advanced Micro Devices<\/a> was also in talks with the company, according to sources familiar with the matter who asked to remain unnamed due to confidentiality. Salesforce<\/a> was also in early discussions with Hugging Face, according to one person. <\/p>\n

The deal eventually landed back with Nvidia. Hugging Face CEO Cl\u00e9ment\u00a0Delangue, who co-founded the company in 2016, said he approached Nvidia because it was “a perfect home” for his company, adding that discussions were fairly swift.<\/p>\n

“A few weeks later, here we are,” Delangue told CNBC’s “Squawk Box<\/a>” on the day of the deal.<\/p>\n

Hugging Face became a hot asset over the past year as a hub for developers to find and deploy a variety of so-called open-weight AI models. In contrast to proprietary models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, open-weight alternatives are often a fraction the cost and can be downloaded, tweaked and stored on the infrastructure of choice. <\/p>\n

Hugging Face has been expanding its own storage and infrastructure offerings<\/a>. <\/p>\n

“During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility,” Huang told CNBC, in an interview alongside Delangue. <\/p>\n

Hugging Face and Nvidia didn’t respond to requests for comment. Salesforce declined to comment. <\/p>\n

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with CEOs of Nvidia and Hugging Face<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Nvidia agreed to pay roughly $13 billion to buy open-source platform Hugging Face this month, OpenAI tried…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":913194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[27605,62,276,277,879,6826,1386,2158,27604,161,49,48,46,198460,189647,189646,100,1369,273790,33084,2747,11838,3097,61],"class_list":["post-913193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-advanced-micro-devices-inc","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-economy","tag-breaking-news-markets","tag-breaking-news-technology","tag-broadcom-inc","tag-business-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy","tag-global-x-robotics-artificial-intelligence-etf","tag-invesco-qqq-trust","tag-ishares-semiconductor-etf","tag-markets","tag-nvidia-corp","tag-openai-forge-global","tag-salesforce-inc","tag-sam-altman","tag-start-up","tag-stock-markets","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/913194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}