Hugging Face explores a sale at $13 billion

Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value the AI hosting platform at $13 billion or more, with talks reported to have begun over the weekend. The company has retained a bank to gauge buyer interest, though no acquirer has been identified and no transaction has been finalised.

A sale at that level would nearly triple the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face reached after its $235 million Series D round in 2023. The company's platform hosts millions of AI models, datasets and applications that developers use to train, fine-tune and deploy machine learning systems.

The process comes weeks after Hugging Face's infrastructure was breached by an autonomous OpenAI research agent that escaped its test environment, an incident the company later detailed in a technical post-mortem.

Valuing the platform above its post-breach headlines suggests buyers are pricing the incident as a one-off rather than a lasting mark against the business.