Nvidia’s acquisition of a company with only 4 patents for $12.9 billion

According to the recently revealed information, in August of 2026, Nvidia and Hugging Face reached certain agreements. Hugging Face is a platform for hosting and developing open-source AI models. The deal is valued at approximately $12.9 billion.

Insights into the reached agreements

Hugging Face's current annual revenue is approximately $150 million, so the deal may look like a huge overpayment. The main concern is the company's patent portfolio, which includes only four active patents, and two were acquired from another company right before the deal with NVIDIA.

Two other active patents were obtained at the beginning of this year. It is strange how the company that has existed for 10 years already has only started bothering about innovation protection in the current year.  

And then Yucheng Low is mentioned as either an author or co-author of all the available patents. He was previously working at Microsoft and Apple.

However, from another perspective, there is nothing strange with such a modest portfolio, as the company is considered to be a global aggregator platform. This open-source project with corresponding philosophy may significantly change after the acquisition.

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