Hugging Face

Amount: USD 235M; Post-money valuation: USD 4.5B; Led by Salesforce Ventures. The strategic investor structure in this round is extremely rare in tech history: Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, IBM, and Salesforce — eight companies competing in cloud and chip markets simultaneously invested in the same open-source AI platform. The reason is clear: they were not making financial bets but ensuring that the "default hub for open-source AI" was not absorbed by any single cloud vendor. If Hugging Face were acquired by AWS, Google and Azure would be in a very passive position; maintaining neutrality best served everyone's interests. This "competitive neutral investment" structure contrasts with Scale AI due to Meta...