Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for thirteen billion dollars. Hugging Face is an open-source platform. OpenAI sparked the bidding war by making an early investment offer. CNBC learned this through channels they will not name because financial journalism is a game of telephone played by people who failed the Series 7.
Thirteen billion dollars for a company named after an emoji your aunt sends when she doesn't understand texting. The open-source community spent two decades building free software so corporations wouldn't own the means of production. Worked great. Now three massive companies bid against each other to own the platform where everyone shares code for free. This is like buying the library and charging admission to return books.
OpenAI made the first move. The company that promised artificial general intelligence for humanity decided humanity needs a bidding war first. Nothing says "open" like a private investment offer that triggers a feeding frenzy among companies worth a combined two trillion dollars. The irony died of natural causes in 2019. We're past irony now. We're in the phase where everything means its opposite and nobody blinks.
Retail traders saw the headlines and immediately started Googling "how to buy Hugging Face stock." You can't. It's private. They Googled it anyway. Probably bought Nvidia calls at the top because they saw the word AI and blacked out. Woke up three days later with a margin call and a Reddit post about diamond hands.
Nvidia paid thirteen billion dollars for a platform where people give away software. The business model is Wikipedia except everyone bidding on it manufactures chips that burn more power than Slovakia. The AI revolution will be monetized, streamed, and sold to the highest bidder. The highest bidder named their company after a graphics card and just wrote a check with more zeroes than your trading account will ever see.
Open-source just got a price tag big enough to buy Honduras.
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