The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Thursday, September 3, 2026
The acquisition of Hugging Face by NVIDIA for $12.9 billion is seen as a strategic move to win across all market segments, including open-source AI. This positions NVIDIA to capture a significant portion of the AI dollar, even if it means subsidizing open-weight models.
“Man making $120 billion a year selling compute decides to buy a company that helps make compute more cost effective, so he can sell more compute.”
“Open source is good for compute self people. If you're selling GPUs, you want everyone else's margin to be lower so your GPUs can be higher.”
“I think that just NVIDIA is playing an endgame now where it has to win every segment of the market.”