The Hugging Face website on a smartphone arranged in New York, Aug. 17, 2023.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hugging Face, an AI firm based in New York, has raised $235 million at a $4.5 billion valuation from some of technology’s biggest companies.
Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm all contributed to the round, the company said. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said the funds are to be focused on hiring talent to be competitive in the artificial intelligence space.
Startups working on AI models have reached high valuations as big companies and venture capitalists seek to plow money in the recent AI boom, which kicked off last year when Microsoft-backed OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot.
Hugging Face’s big valuation and crop of prominent backers reflect how a more collaborative approach to building AI has been gaining steam in recent months, especially after Facebook parent Meta released its Llama large language model, which is free to use for the vast majority of companies.
Other highly valued AI startups, like OpenAI or Cohere, work on the technology directly and guard the results as a trade secret, then charge customers to access them through application programming interfaces, or AIs.
But Hugging Face produces a platform where AI developers can share code, models, data sets, and use the company’s developer tools to get open-source artificial intelligence models running more easily. In particular, Hugging Face often hosts weights, or large files with lists of numbers, which are the heart of most modern AI models.
While Hugging Face has developed some models, like BLOOM, its primary product is its website platform, where users can upload models and their weights. It also develops a series of software tools called libraries that allow users to get models working quickly, to clean up large datasets, or to evaluate their performance. It also hosts some AI models in a web interface so end users can experiment with them.
It’s similar in theme and practice to code-repository GitHub (which Microsoft acquired in 2018), where coders from around the world post their projects while they’re working on them.
Hugging Face endorses the belief that most companies working with AI will want to develop their own models or technology, and will need tools to do so, co-founder and CEO Delangue told CNBC. He hopes that AI developers will rely on Hugging Face on a daily basis to get their work done.
One reason the big companies are investing: Their employees are actively using the platform, he said.
“AI builders are using Hugging Face all day, every day,” Delangue said. He predicted that the number of software developers working with AI models would grow in the coming years.
“Maybe in five years, you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position,” he said.
Although most attention in recent weeks has been on so-called large language models like ChatGPT or Llama that focus on generating text, Hugging Face hosts any AI model, including ones that generate music or images, translate languages, or identify objects inside images. Hugging Face hosts 500,000 different AI models, 250,000 data sets, and has 10,000 paying customers, the company said.
Hugging Face is named after an emoji, the hugging face, a smiley face framed by two open hands.
The name and logo date back to the company’s founding. Hugging Face was originally a iPhone chatbot app, but when the company open-sourced some its machine-learning code, it realized that it was catching on with AI developers, and pivoted toward that.
“When we started the company, with my co founders Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, we joked that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three letter ticker,” Delangue said.
“Maybe during this round we should start our lobbying exercise with the Nadsaq for them to allow us to use emojis on their board,” he quipped.
CrowdStrike logo is seen in this illustration taken July 29, 2024.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
CrowdStrike shares popped about 13%, a day after the cybersecurity firm issued better-than-expected long-term guidance at its investor day.
The company on Wednesday said it expects net new annual recurring revenues to grow at least 20% in 2027, ahead of analysts’ expectations. CrowdStrike plans for ARR to hit $10 billion by 2031, and then double to $20 billion by 2036.
“CrowdStrike is by far the most advanced security platform in the industry, and the plethora of AI-based solutions announced today will further separate CrowdStrike from the competition,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Nowinski in a note following the event.
Some Wall Street firms also boosted their price targets.
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Cybersecurity has taken center stage this year as businesses beef up security in the age of artificial intelligence. Many companies have harnessed AI tools to strengthen their offering as threats rise in sophistication.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company’s $5 billion investment and technology collaboration with Intel comes after the two companies held discussions for nearly a year.
Huang said that he communicated personally with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan about the partnership. He called Tan a “longtime friend” on a Thursday call with reporters after the companies announced that Nvidia would co-develop data center and PC chips with Intel as part of the investment deal. On the call, Tan said he and Huang have known each other for 30 years.
“We thought it was going to be such an incredible investment,” Huang said.
Nvidia said it will collaborate with the chipmaker to create artificial intelligence systems for data centers that combine Intel’s x86-based central processors with Nvidia’s graphics processors and networking.
Intel will also sell CPUs for PCs and notebooks that integrate Nvidia graphics processors, or GPUs.
The transaction itself took a few months to come together, Intel’s revenue chief Greg Ernst wrote in a LinkedIn post, adding that the agreement was reached on Saturday.
The investment highlights how the fortunes of the two companies have switched atop Silicon Valley’s pecking order as a result of the AI explosion ushered in by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Intel shares are down 31.78% in the last five years, while Nvidia shares are up 1,348% as of opening prices on Thursday. Nvidia is worth over $4.25 trillion, while Intel is only worth $143 billion.
How Intel and Nvidia will collaborate
For decades, the most important part in a PC or server was the central processor, and Intel dominated the market for those chips. But AI infrastructure, like the machines in the $4 billion data center Microsoft announced on Thursday, often needs two or more Nvidia GPUs for every one CPU.
Nvidia AI systems, like the NVL72 used by Microsoft, come with Arm-based CPUs, instead of Intel x86-based CPUs. On the call, Huang said Nvidia will soon support Intel’s CPUs in its NVLink racks for AI.
“We’ll buy those CPUs from from Intel, and then we’ll connect it into super chips that then becomes our compute node, that then gets integrated into a rack scale AI supercomputer,” Huang said.
Nvidia will also contribute GPU technology to Intel chips that ship in laptops and PCs, which is an underserved market, Huang said. In total, the addressable markets for the two product collaborations are worth $50 billion, Huang said.
“We’re going to become a very large customer of Intel CPUs, and we’re going to be a large supplier of GPU chiplets into Intel” chips, he said.
Huang said the deal with Intel will have “no” impact on Nvidia’s business relationship with Arm.
Thursday’s investment deal is focused on the relationship between Nvidia and Intel’s product division, not its foundry. The two companies, however, did not rule out future foundry partnerships.
“We’ve always evaluated Intel’s foundry technology, and we’re going to continue to do it, but today, this announcement, is squarely focused on these custom CPUs,” Huang said. Nvidia currently uses Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to manufacture its chips.
The collaboration will use Intel’s packaging, which is a part chip manufacturing that occurs toward the end of the process and combines several chip components into a single part that can be installed in machines.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan makes a speech on stage in Taipei, Taiwan May 19, 2025.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Tan said he was grateful for Nvidia’s vote of confidence.
“‘I’d like to thank Jensen for the confidence in me, and our team and Intel will work really hard to make sure it’s a good return for you,” Tan said.
Last year, Intel’s board removed previous CEO Pat Gelsinger because of rising costs in its manufacturing business and the company’s failure to gain a foothold in AI chips. In March, Intel named Tan, a well-connected investor who had turned around chip software firm Cadence Design Systems, its new chief executive.
Tan has focused on cutting costs and raising money in his short tenure leading Intel even as the future of the company’s manufacturing business, called Intel Foundry, remains unclear.
In addition to the $5 billion from Nvidia and $8.9 billion from the U.S. government, Intel has taken a $2 billion investment from SoftBank, sold a majority stake in its ASIC subsidiary Altera to Silver Lake for $3.3 billion and sold $1 billion in stock from Mobileye, its self-driving car subsidiary.
Intel has also cut significant staff, saying in July that it would eliminate 15% of its workforce by the end of the year.
The company develops its own chips as well as manufacturing them. It wants to manufacture chips for companies like Nvidia or Apple, but has yet to secure them as customers. Analysts say Intel needs a big foundry client to signal that its technology is stable and ready for volume production.
But cutting-edge chip manufacturing is expensive, and Intel has signaled that if it can’t get enough customers, it may not continue investing in its foundry. That could spark a reaction from Washington, whose politicians and lobbyists consider Intel to be strategically important for the nation because it is the only American company capable of manufacturing the most advanced chips.
The Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel in August. Intel was previously in line to receive $8.9 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS Act, but the Trump administration asked and received an equity stake in the chipmaker in exchange for the money.
Huang was with Trump this week in England to attend a State Dinner at Windsor Palace and announce new projects and investments in the U.K. But the Trump administration wasn’t involved in this deal, according to a White House official and Huang.
“Intel’s new partnership with Nvidia is a major milestone for American high-tech manufacturing,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
Bees are critical for ensuring an abundant food supply year-round, but the bee population is in big trouble.
More than one-third of the crops we eat are pollinated by bees, but 40% of bee colonies are collapsing each year, California-based Beewise said.
One reason is climate change – specifically, stronger hurricanes, more frequent fires and the use of more pesticides.
The wooden beehive was invented around 1850 for commercial pollination, but these basic boxes are not very protective and not at all nurturing.
Startup Beewise is taking on the traditional beehive with AI and robotics. The company invented the BeeHome, a robotic, AI-directed beehive that growers can rent.
“A robotic beehive is essentially like a traditional beehive. It’s completely backwards compatible, so it uses the same frame, same bees. We populate these robotic beehives, and in that robotic beehive, there’s cameras that monitor the bees,” said Saar Safra, CEO of Beewise.
The cameras connect with AI software that monitors each individual bee and identifies its needs. The robotic apparatus can then treat the bees according to their characteristics.
“So if there’s not enough food in the hive, there’s a food container inside this robotic beehive and the robot will take some food supply to the bees. Same thing with medicine, thermoregulation, too cold, too warm, there’s a storm. We can keep the bees comfortable in their home without them being harmed by external weather patterns,” said Safra.
Last year, hurricanes Helene and Milton damaged or destroyed thousands of commercial beehives in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina alone.
The BeeHome costs about the same as the traditional wooden beehive and can robotically manage up to 10 hives each, saving growers on labor costs. Next-gen products could scale that up dramatically — a feature particularly attractive to investors.
“You’ll be looking at a BeeHome in a few years that can not only manage 10, but go up to 40 or more. And that’s where you get a lot of operating margin and operating profit off of the same investment,” said John Caddedu, co-founder and general partner at Corner Ventures.
Safra said the Beehome results in 70% lower bee colony loss and healthier hives. There are already thousands of these operating in the field. Safra said revenue, device and customer growth have been enormous, adding that the devices are seeing gross margins of 40%.
In addition to Corner Ventures, Beewise is backed by Insight Partners, Fortissimo, Lool Ventures, and APG. Its total funding so far is $170 million.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.