Nvidia has confirmed the acquisition of the AI hosting platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The company's cash flow for the last quarter reached $24 billion, making the deal a strategic move to support an ecosystem of specialized open-source models and hedge against competitors like Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft.
In the venture capital space, Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly in talks to raise between $5 billion and $6 billion in a round led by Accel, with Nvidia expected to contribute approximately $2.5 billion. Other notable investments include Physical Superintelligence, which raised $58 million, and Aranya, which secured $11 million to convert bare-metal servers into AI clusters.
Further funding rounds were completed by DataAgent, which raised $10 million for Kubernetes cluster fault fixing, and Visko, which raised $10 million to launch its long-form video generation model Orbis. Additionally, market research startup askpolly raised $3 million, and the AI infrastructure startup Wafer raised $40 million at a valuation of $200 million.
In the networking sector, Spain's iPronics secured $125 million from Nvidia and other investors for data center networking chips. Meanwhile, Critical Munitions Group raised $10.3 million to automate the production of military-grade explosives.
Corporate leadership changes are widespread. Adobe appointed Anil Chakravarthy as the new president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen. Apple is transitioning leadership as Tim Cook becomes executive chairman and John Ternus begins his era, while Phil Schiller scales back his role.
Other industry updates include Google winning an antitrust case regarding its ad placement business and SoftBank's AI infrastructure unit planning to go public despite having zero revenue.
