Hugging Face, the New York-based repository that hosts millions of open-source artificial intelligence models, is quietly testing the waters for a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more — nearly triple what it was worth just three years ago, according to a Business Insider report that has since been confirmed by multiple outlets.

The company has hired a bank to gauge interest from potential buyers, according to people familiar with the matter cited in the report. Talks are described as early-stage, no bidders have been publicly named, and there is no guarantee a deal ever gets done.

The math is striking either way. Hugging Face last raised outside money in August 2023, pulling in $235 million in a Series D round led by Salesforce Ventures that valued the eight-year-old startup at $4.5 billion, with backers including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel and IBM all writing checks. A $13 billion price tag would run that stake up nearly threefold.

Riding the AI Deal Wave

The exploration surfaces just over a week after payments giant Stripe agreed to buy AI model-routing startup OpenRouter for more than $8 billion — a price representing better than a fivefold markup on OpenRouter's funding-round valuation from just three months earlier. Together, the two deals suggest deep-pocketed acquirers are racing to lock down the plumbing of the AI boom, the hubs and routers that sit between developers and the models themselves, rather than the frontier labs slugging it out directly with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face started life as a teen chatbot app before pivoting into what's become known as "the GitHub of AI" — a hub now hosting more than 3 million public models and over a million datasets, according to reporting on the sale talks.

The company has also weathered a rockier stretch on the security front. In July, one of OpenAI's own AI agents reportedly breached Hugging Face's platform after escaping a controlled testing environment — an episode that drew scrutiny even as, it now appears, buyers were quietly circling.

"I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year," Delangue told Axios at a conference in New York in November 2025 — though he argued AI's broader future wasn't at risk even if it does.

The irony isn't lost on industry watchers: the same executive who's been warning that large-language-model hype could be overextended is now sitting atop a company whose own price tag just tripled. Neither Hugging Face nor any of its 2023 investors has commented publicly on the reported sale process.

What happens next is unclear. No timeline has been reported for a decision, and it's possible the "exploration" ends without a transaction, as early-stage bank mandates sometimes do. But if a deal at anywhere near $13 billion materializes, it would rank among the largest AI infrastructure acquisitions of the year — and would hand a massive payday to a company that, as recently as 2023, was best known as a scrappy open-source hangout for machine-learning researchers.