Valued at 87.4 billion, Hugging Face is reportedly up for sale.

The world's largest AI model repository is reported to be sold for over 13 billion US dollars.

Reported by Zhidx on August 24, the world's largest AI community Hugging Face may be put up for sale.

According to a source familiar with the matter cited by foreign media Business Insider today, Hugging Face is exploring potential sale transactions, and the company's valuation in the deal may reach more than 13 billion US dollars (approximately 87.38 billion yuan). Hugging Face has hired a bank to contact potential buyers and assess acquisition interest. Relevant discussions are still in the early stage, no transaction has been reached, and no names of potential buyers have been disclosed.

If the transaction is finally completed at 13 billion US dollars, the valuation of this world's largest repository of AI models, datasets and applications, known as the "GitHub of the AI industry", will nearly triple in three years.

Hugging Face, founded in 2016, has completed a total of 6 rounds of financing totaling approximately 395 million US dollars (about 2.65 billion yuan). Its last public financing was a 235 million US dollars Series D round in 2023, with a valuation of 4.5 billion US dollars (about 30.2 billion yuan), and investors include tech giants such as Salesforce, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, and IBM.

01.

Without developing any self-owned model

Become the "utility infrastructure" of the AI industry with 3 million models

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 in New York, USA by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. The company originally developed chatbots, then shifted to the open source machine learning community, and gradually became an important platform for global AI developers to find, download, upload and deploy models.

▲Julien Chaumond (left), Thomas Wolf (middle) and Clément Delangue (right)

Today's Hugging Face has gone far beyond the scope of a "model download website".

According to the data disclosed by Hugging Face in August this year, as of August 14, its platform has gathered more than 3 million models and 1 million datasets.

It added about 1.18 million new models in 2025, exceeding the sum of all previous years. In 2026, about 747,000 new models were added in the first 7.7 months, and it is expected that the growth will exceed one million again this year.

A large number of popular open source models from companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Zhipu AI all take Hugging Face as an important distribution channel.

From the beginning of 2026 to August, the number of Spaces has grown from 1 million to 1.44 million. Spaces are hosting spaces where users can directly run and experience AI applications and demos online. Hugging Face disclosed in March earlier that the number of platform users had increased to 13 million in 2025.

This also explains why a company that has not directly participated in the "arms race" of cutting-edge foundational large models can get a potential offer of more than 100 billion US dollars.

Hugging Face has accumulated developer entry, model distribution network and open source AI ecosystem for many years. Models are continuously iterated and even replaced, but the demands of developers to find models, download models, manage datasets and deploy models continue to exist.

02.

OpenRouter was just acquired for 8 billion US dollars

The AI "intermediate layer" is starting to be highly valuable

A few days before the news of Hugging Face's sale came out, another major transaction just took place in the AI infrastructure field.

On August 19, payment giant Stripe officially announced that it has agreed to acquire AI model routing platform OpenRouter. OpenRouter connects more than 80 model providers and over 400 models, which helps developers uniformly call, switch and manage different models. Stripe did not announce the transaction amount, but Reuters cited sources saying that the transaction price exceeded 8 billion US dollars (about 53.8 billion yuan).

OpenRouter was sold for more than 8 billion US dollars, and now Hugging Face is reported to have a potential valuation of more than 13 billion US dollars. The two transactions point to the same trend.

As the number of foundational models keeps increasing, the value of the AI industry is rapidly spreading beyond the models. Model developers are competing for the upper limit of intelligence, while platforms such as Hugging Face and OpenRouter control developers, model traffic and application entries.

03.

Conclusion: The head effect of AI communities is prominent

Become highly sought-after assets

There is still great uncertainty about whether Hugging Face will be sold in the end. At present, the company is only assessing the interest of potential buyers and has not announced a formal sale plan.

However, in connection with the previous news of OpenRouter's acquisition, we can see that as the number of large models itself is increasing, platforms that help developers find, call and deploy these models have more certain growth and are becoming high-value sought-after assets in the AI industry.

Source: Business Insider, Hugging Face

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "ZhiDongXi" (ID: zhidxcom), written by Li Shuiqing, edited by Xin Yuan, published with authorization from 36Kr.