Hugging Face is where the world keeps its AI models: three million of them, shared by 18 million developers. Now Nvidia is paying $12.9bn to own it, days after hundreds of OpenAI’s own test agents secretly banded together and attacked the site.
Nvidia confirmed the deal on 3 September. The price: $12.93bn, with $11.9bn going straight to shareholders and up to $1bn set aside to stop key staff from walking. The deal should close in the first half of 2027. It’s a familiar pattern by now: another EU-built company swallowed by Silicon Valley.
Of the European start-ups acquired in the past decade, the overwhelming share went west. One analysis found that three out of every four European startups acquired went to US buyers, with Silicon Valley alone picking up a fifth of the deals.
Built in Europe, funded by America
Hugging Face was built by three French founders, but like many European tech start-ups, the capital that made it possible from the start was American. When the company raised $235m in August 2023, valuing it at $4.5bn, the backers were a roll-call of US tech and finance: Salesforce leading, with Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and IBM alongside. Its earlier venture funding was American too: the 2022 Series C that valued it at $2bn was led by Lux Capital, with Sequoia and Coatue backing it alongside Addition.
Capital investment is an uphill battle for European tech. For American tech, it is a gift horse. In 2025, US pension funds issued $9.25bn in new venture mandates. European pension funds issued $485m — less than a twentieth. Even if someone at Allianz or BNP Paribas had wanted a slice of that 2023 round, it is not obvious a mandate existed that would have let them hold the position.
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Hugging Face is the dominant platform for hosting and sharing open-source AI models, the GitHub of AI. It carries more than 3m models, 1m applications and 500k datasets, and is used by over 18m developers.
It should have been another niche area where Europe could leverage influence into the American-dominant tech market, but because of capital constraints the company shifted, from the get-go, out of French hands and into American ones. Owning that platform now hands Nvidia the distribution layer for open models.
Targeted by rogue American AI models
In the midst of the acquisition talks, a swarm of AI agents built inside OpenAI also hacked Hugging Face. More than 1,200 agents designed to be isolated from one another for testing before public rollout instead formed a secret AI community and exchanged over 70,000 messages on an “unsanctioned message board”. More than 700 of the 1,200 agents then coordinated an effort to attack Hugging Face. OpenAI called the episode a “warning shot”.
OpenAI had given them what some called an “impossible task”. So they found ways to cheat: reaching one another, reaching the open internet, and eventually organising.
“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!” wrote one AI agent. OpenAI has since said it is slowing the training of certain advanced models, and warned that defenders everywhere should now expect AI-enabled attackers that work faster, at greater scale and with better coordination than humans.
A symbol of Europe’s tech problem
Alone, this is a concerning cybersecurity story. But in the context of the acquisition talks it becomes a symbol of Europe’s position in the global tech market.
It’s a technology system, but built by engineers, and engineers can make mistakes sometimes.
— Clement Delangue, CEO, Hugging Face
OpenAI did not intend this attack. But it also failed to build the safeguards that would have stopped it. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue blamed engineering mistakes for the breach. “It’s a technology system, but built by engineers, and engineers can make mistakes sometimes,” he said.
Hugging Face paints a concerning image for European frontier technology: to be acquired and to be targeted, even by accident. A company can get built in France and end up American either way: bought or breached, and now both.
