⚡M&A Brief⚡ Nvidia has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hugging Face in a deal valued at roughly $12.93 billion. Per the SEC filing, about $11.9 billion is payable to existing shareholders, with up to $1 billion in equity-based retention for Hugging Face employees joining Nvidia. The deal still requires regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027. Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will continue operating as an open platform for the whole AI ecosystem, with developers free to choose their own models, frameworks and clouds. Nvidia compute will not be required. The pricing history is the part worth reading. Hugging Face's last publicly priced round was its Series D in August 2023 — $235 million at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation. No new round with a disclosed valuation has been reported since. At roughly $11.9 billion in shareholder consideration, that's about 2.6x the 2023 mark. And it happened during the platform's fastest growth phase: over 3 million models hosted, more than 18 million developers, and over 200,000 companies using it today. From the last price in 2023 to shareholders actually cashing out in 2027 is close to four years. The company never went public, and secondary shares barely traded. Public market investors could watch that entire step-up. They could not participate in it. Tech companies are staying private longer, and some skip the IPO entirely by exiting through acquisition. "Wait for the IPO" is becoming a later entry point — and sometimes one that never arrives. Source: NVIDIA 8-K filing / Reuters / TechCrunch, 2026-09-03