On January 30th, according to the British Financial Times, late last year, as a chip giantNvidiaTowards Hugging Face Throw a half a billion dollarsinvestAT THE TIME OF THE LETTER OF INTENT, THE AI FOUNDER MADE AN UNEXPECTED DECISION - TO REFUSE。
According to well-informed sources, the transaction could have pushed the Hugging Face valuation to $7 billion, more than its total financing over the past decade. However, the company chose to say “no”。
In this regard, Hugo Face does not want a single lead investor to influence decision-making, which is not commented upon by the British Government。
Hugo Face operates a platform that hosts 2.5 million open AI models and over 700,000 open data sets, which users can download freely. The popularity of a model on Hugging Face has become an important ruler for measuring its adoption by AI developers。
With 13 million users around the world, Hugging Face works to promote a free and open “open source” model for developers, which makes it easier for Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Ali Baba to reach users worldwide。
This model runs counter to the main Silicon Valley players, such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, which focus on building “closed source” proprietary models and then selling access to consumers and businesses. Hughing Face is at the centre of a geopolitical and commercial game about how artificial intelligence should be constructed, shared and owned。
“The open source model helps to promote the democratization of AI against the concentration of power. In my view, the concentration of power is the greatest risk in the AI field,” said Clement Durange, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face。
The sound financial situation is where Hugh Face dares to reject the British Virgin. Companies use a “free value-added” business model, with about 31 TP3T customers (usually large enterprises) paying for additional functions such as greater storage space and private warehouse privileges。
Delange revealed that the company had realized a profit in 2025, but that there was a loss in the first quarter of the year due to the investment data set. The Hugging Face accumulated $400 million in financing, with a 2023 valuation of $4.5 billion, and is still in the books at half. Delange stressed that the company did not seek to maximize income, but rather encouraged developers to provide open-source alternatives to text, images and visual models。
Thomas Wolfe, co-founder and chief science officer of the company, believes that the rise of Chinese enterprises such as DeepSeek is becoming a benefit of Hugging Face, which proves the power of the open source model. “The open-source model does not have to be a second-class citizen, but can actually be very, very impressive”, he said。
In 2022, Hugging Face introduced the multilingual AI model BLOOM, but has since gradually withdrawn from the self-study model area to control costs and avoid competition with models hosted by the Platform。
Wolfe described the shift of companies to investing in robotics, data sets and scientific research in AI, and the purchase of robotics in Pollen last year at an undisclosed amount。
Hugging Face's unique enterprise architecture goes hand in hand with its decentralised AI development philosophy. Employees can work remotely anywhere in the world, the company has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland, and Delange himself is based in Miami. This globalized pattern of communication through the Slack makes some former employees feel marginalized from major strategic decisions。
According to the source, in recent months employees have left because of a perceived mismatch between their work and the rapidly changing corporate priorities。
In terms of remuneration, the annual salary paid to researchers by Hugging Face is usually between $100,000 and $200,000 (note: the current exchange rate is approximately 696,000 to 139.91 million yuan yuan), well below the US$ million level of the top of the technology giant, the AI researcher, but largely the same as the start-up company. Wolf believes that, as compensation, the company offers researchers a clear mission -- to confront Silicon Valley hegemonics and to allow them to pursue an interest in the direction of research。
Unlike a large technology company that strictly regulates staff communications through confidentiality agreements, Hugging Face allows employees to speak openly about their work. "Our employees are usually extremely exposed," Wolf said, "I think it's good for them. But [so] they keep getting invitations to dig."
This freedom is still attractive to Hugo Face, chief ethical scientist and co-founder of Google AI, Margaret Mitchell. The researcher, who was based in Seattle, stated that she had rejected jobs with an annual salary in excess of US$ million only to adhere to the Hugging Face “anti-Silica Valley”. "I don't want to lose my voice," she said。