AI Today: Hugging Face Shops Itself

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Nvidia’s name is on both sides of today’s two biggest money stories, and in one of them it’s the company that got turned down. Hugging Face — the open-model hub that declined a $500 million Nvidia check last year — is now shopping itself at nearly double the valuation it refused. That’s the weekend in one sentence: the infrastructure layer is getting priced, and the people who own the distribution are choosing their buyers.

Business & Industry

Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B Business Insider broke it over the weekend: the company has been talking to banks to evaluate bids, with no buyer identified and no deal reached. The comparison that matters is its own history — Hugging Face was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023 in a Salesforce Ventures-led round, and it recently declined a $500 million Nvidia investment that would have valued it at $7 billion. CEO Clem Delangue has said the company is close to profitability and only recently started spending money it raised three years ago, which makes this look less like a rescue and more like a decision that the model hub is worth more inside someone else’s stack. The July breach involving OpenAI’s pre-release models is the one item on the other side of the ledger.

Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity at a $30B+ valuation The Information reported Sunday that Nvidia is among the prospective investors in a round worth several billion dollars. That would be a 50%-plus step up from Perplexity’s roughly $20 billion mark about a year ago, and the revenue supports some of it: annualized revenue is above $750 million, up from under $250 million at the start of the year. Nothing is closed and Perplexity declined to comment. Read this next to the Poolside license deal I covered yesterday — Nvidia keeps buying positions in the companies that consume its chips, and Nvidia reports earnings this week.

Model Releases

Alibaba launched Wan3.0 a day after a $10B share sale The video model generates 30-second clips in a single pass — double Wan2.7’s 15-second ceiling — and takes documents, spreadsheets, slides, and web pages as input, not just text prompts. It has been in public beta since August 6 via Alibaba Cloud’s Model Studio, used in short drama production, advertising, and tourism promotion. The financing is the harder number: the placement is the largest primary follow-on ever by a Hong Kong-listed company, and it lands after Alibaba posted a 75% drop in quarterly earnings driven by AI capital expenditure. That is what buying your way into the frontier costs on the income statement.

Robotics

XPeng’s robotics unit raised over $900M at a $6.3B valuation IDG Capital led, with Gaorong Ventures participating and Tencent and Alibaba in as strategic investors — the largest single private round in China’s embodied-AI sector, per the company. The money goes to the IRON humanoid: 76 degrees of freedom body-wide plus 21 per hand, running three in-house Turing chips for up to 2,250 TOPS. Mass production is targeted by year-end with deployments in XPeng’s own retail stores and campuses first, commercial sales in 2027. Worth noting the market reaction was not about robots — XPeng shares fell around 7% on a Q2 miss the same day.

Skipped as already covered: the Nvidia–Poolside $6B license, Broadcom’s debt raise, and the Nevada robotaxi permits all ran yesterday and haven’t materially changed.

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