JUST IN: Hugging Face is reportedly exploring a sale above $13B, nearly triple its last disclosed valuation.

Business Insider reports the company is working with a bank to gauge bidders and the price would be nearly 3X the $4.5B valuation set by its $235M Series D in 2023.

HuggingFace now hosts more than 2M models, 1.5M datasets and 1.5M AI apps.

A buyer would be acquiring the distribution layer around those assets, plus the workflow that helps developers find an artifact, judge whether it is safe, and put it into production. As open models multiply, that coordination layer becomes harder to replace.

Both Stripe’s purchase of OpenRouter and this new interest on Hugging Face looks like a bet on persistent model fragmentation, as the future.