Comment by Gigachad
4 hours ago
What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
4 hours ago
What is the business model of hugging face? My understanding was they were basically just a file hosting platform.
They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.
Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.
I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times.
–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.
5 replies →
Risk management.
Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation.
Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.
> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.
To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.
2 replies →
This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free
9 replies →
They make it easy to run models. The models have to run on hardware somewhere.
https://huggingface.co/pricing
Possibly, but they were profitable already.
Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.
If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)
I guess we may have to start paying to download models.
Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.
I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.
I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.
NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.
Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?
File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.
Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.
Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.
it's literally the GitHub for AI
Github was acquired for $7B. It's hard for me to see how HF is worth almost double Github.
GitHub was acquired for 10B in 2026 dollars. And software on HF requires quite a bit more hardware expenditure to run.
ondemand cloud? b2b?