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Nvidia’s acquisitions of the talent of Poolside for nearly $7 Billion and Hugging Face for nearly $13 Billion have really shocked me. Jensen Huang is very close to Donald Trump and has been doing lobbying diplomatically for America with incredible ties with Taiwan. Capital constraint is what limits feeding the demand for compute, and Nvidia has a lot of capital now.
Trump made Jensen invest in Intel, no problem. OpenAI needs bailouts, no problem. Need to force TSMC to build more Fabs in Arizona, got it. Wall Street wants to make a $500 Billion dollar financing consortium, no problem. What will U.S. mafia capitalism even become in this AI boom? Enter Nvidia’s real self-interests. When Nvidia or Palantir started their sales pitch of “Sovereign AI”, I was immediately put on guard. This was a sign of things to come folks.
Can you trust any corporate entity to be a steward of what was a fairly agnostic European AI startup crucial for Open-Source model discovery like Hugging Face? It’s an abomination. Nvidia has invested in the open-source AI community, but now it appears it’s getting into software and LLMs of its own while it holds GPU leverage among huge customers who lead the closed-source AI race.
Huge conflicts of interest here and the U.S. holding the world hostage with Sovereign AI. Do I need to accept a world where monopolies like Meta and Nvidia lead America open-source AI and somehow believe they will operate as good actors? Jensen Huang and people like Alexandre Wang? Zuck as a force for America?
It’s Nvidia’s second-biggest purchase, after it paid $20 billion for Groq assets at the end of last year. Meanwhile pre IPO I was notified that Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown said he “really loved” a post from President Donald Trump on data centers this week. So this is how it’s going to be? You bend the knee and are allowed to be a monopoly and have unfair advantages in the great American name. Not the AI supremacy I was hoping Nvidia would become.
So this is how it’s going to be:
European AI startups will be stripped of their agency and M&A will consolidate even further U.S. AI Supremacy over the rest of the world. I’m sure Europe, the open-source AI community and France regulators are thrilled at the news.
$12.9 Billion. That’s all it cost for Nvidia to buy out open-source AI, for itself.
Nvidia’s circular financing is literally propping up BigTech capex to go on indefinitely until the capital, foreign bonds, offerings, debt and margin debt opps run out. That’s, not even American. It’s a highly monopolistic playbook that benefits Silicon Valley and Wall Street with the Trump Administration, literally against Americans. AI is literally inflationary in such an environment.
It’s going to further hurt the labor market for millions of people.
I’m all for Taiwan, TSMC and the democratization of AI but one company should never have this much power or the GPU and an “AI Bank” with AI chip margins like this and leverage that Nvidia has, now with Trump’s full support. It’s a gross abuse of power. It’s not a success story based on the principles of free market capitalism.
Jensen Huang:
“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. They allow every developer, startup, university, industry and country to build with, customize and benefit from AI.”
Dealroom had insinuated recently that Europe could block the acquisition, and I agree. This is very dangerous for both Europe and China.
The CEO of Hugging Face pretends that this was his idea - a likely story! Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC on Thursday that the company approached Huang over the summer about a deal, “and a few weeks later, here we are.” That’s definitely not how this went down.
While Nvidia backed Thinking Machines eyes a $40 Bn. valuation with what sales exactly, this is getting out of proportion. The U.S. is doing everything it can to suppress Chinese open-weight model proficient labs even if that means harming Europe’s AI ecosystem and the agnostic neutrality of the industry.
You won’t find real critical opinions on this on the white-washed AI slop versions of LinkedIn or X. (Or Substack for that matter). The new normal is just American Mafia capitalism and treating rich people like Gods. That’s not what America values are really about.
Companies that think they are benevolent the way OpenAI once did have an inevitable turn to the dark side. Nvidia and Anthropic still think they can be good guys:
“During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility.”
Such altruism! Nvidia and Anthropic could easily be unrecognizable in a few years time as far as values and direction goes. At least Jensen Huang is more appropriate in his opinions and public comments.
More than 18 million developers, researchers and creators use Hugging Face to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications. More than 200,000 companies use the platform to discover, evaluate, customize and deploy AI. And now Nvidia will have access to all of that insider data. Hugging Face has been of the key hubs for open-source models for years. I saw what happend to Github when Microsoft acquired it, we’ve seen what tends to happen.
European regulators—primarily the European Commission under antitrust and competition law—have strict grounds to scrutinize or block Nvidia’s $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. While Hugging Face began as a French startup, it has grown into the central hub for global open-source AI development. Should we trust an American GPU monopoly with being a custodian of that kind of a community? Are we that gullible?
Nvidia could now become the center of the developer experience in AI while being the primary and only major GPU provider as well.
Does that sound like a healthy world of democratizing AI to you? A company that has practically circular financing on an unprecedented scale just for American and corporate self-interests that has actively benefited monopolies (its customers) and harmed other competitors?
Delangue said he approached first because Nvidia was “a perfect home” for his company, adding that discussions went quite fast to get a deal done. I understand these French executives are happy, they are hugging, they are cashing out.
Hugging Face, founded in 2016, is one of the most popular hubs where developers share and download open source AI models and now Hugging Face will dominate the ecosystem and learn how to build the winning models, for themselves. For all of their incredible American partners.
Nvidia isn’t just protecting its own AI chip moat here, it’s entering a dominant position in yet another industry. Open-source models are taking marketshare from OpenAI and Anthropic, and fast. if Nvidia can be an AI hardware and software leader, it will be nearly insurmountable. It’s open-weight models have already gotten a lot better in recent months. Jensen Huang has scratched Trump’s back, and not just kissed the ring. The sky is the limit for Nvidia now.
Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company due to the insatiable demand for GPUs and now has both political and financial leverage in the AI ecosystem. But that wasn’t enough. Dominating the future of open-source AI was part of the plan. Nvidia’s venture arm was quick to invest in highly touted Open-source AI related startups since at least 2023. Nvidia could become a direct competitor to the various AI startups it has invested in. Not just a facilitator and dealer, but beat them at their own game. This is what U.S. capitalism has come to in the AI boom. Fewer winners as consolidation has sped up this year. What now stops Nvidia doing the same thing in robotics and Quantum? Tell me. There’s literally no antitrust or AI regulatory scrutiny left in Trump’s America.
Jensen Huang seems like a nice guy. But this is very dangerous.
Loss of platform neutrality
Abuse of data advantage and acquisition of distressed open-source AI companies when the bubble pops
Erosion of Hugging Face independence, uncompetitive behavior
Telemetry and competitive intelligence, Nvidia will have deep access to Chinese models
Corporate enclosure of the "Open-Source Commons" and playing both sides
If I was an open-source AI developer I’d be up in arms. I’d understand what would probably happen here. $13 Billion is nothing for Nvidia, but it damages France and Europe role in the future of AI significantly here.
Developers are right to cautious and skeptical about this, it’s a huge red flag. This isn’t in the spirit of the open-source movement. This isn’t even what’s good for the AI Boom. The questions over Nvidia’s circular financing have already hit record levels.
Even before the acquisition, Nvidia’s role on Hugging Face has been surging.
“A thriving ecosystem of open source AI models gives customers more alternatives to those closed labs, which in turn keeps more of the market dependent on Nvidia.” - TechCrunch
Nvidia will now benefit from both its rich closed model customers, their BigTech Cloud providers and the smaller model makers all over the world - directly. If that’s not a ponzi scheme of AI, I don’t know what is. Nvidia buys the semiconductor equipment at a premium and will accelerate innovation, the American way. The main benefactor of BigTech Capex, is now the central hub in the entire made in the U.S. model of AI Supremacy.
The crazy part? Hugging Face previously rejected a large Nvidia investment offer (reported around a $7B valuation) specifically to avoid a dominant investor influencing decisions. But if you double the money, apparently that’s okay. The French, you know. Idealistic, to a point.
Hugging Face functions as a neutral distribution platform for AI models, datasets, and execution pipelines across all hardware ecosystems. How can we be sure that under Nvidia it will continue to do so? Will Chinese model maker be treated the same as American ones? Will developers from other countries be treated the same as American developers? Funny quote I saw on socials: with Nvidia:
“acquisitions have started going into that leather jacket like candy”
Nvidia was already powerful but at what point is it not healthy for the ecosystem? They want the U.S. to win, but at what cost to the world? Hugging Face was recently at the center of a hacking incident with OpenAI that raised concerns about the rapid evolution of power. Should we be surprised or distraught that Hugging Face’s days as an independent outfit appear numbered? Or that Nvidia may not be the good actor we had once been nudged into hoping it was? These are commercial entities that make up marketing terms like “Sovereign AI”, the min I saw Palantir adopt it too my heart sank.
In the Era of the Trump Administration we cannot hope that Americans will be good custodians of AI, full stop. Jensen’s closeness with Trump is likely just business, right - right?
M&A and consolidation is devastating because the AI boom was already very centralized, monpolistic and clearly accelerating wealth inequality at an unimaginable scale. Now Nvidia is at the center of this. Am I supposed to be excited? At a time when there is so little rule of law in the world? When what the U.S. stands for has been so corrupted by the profit motive?
This American industrial revolution of AI sounds fairly toxic for the rest of the world the way things are going. And I’m genuinely worried. I never truly trusted Hugging Face executives were in it for the right reasons, and now I know why my suspicious were itching at me. An exit has to make sense for the future of what you’ve been building. This in a climate where Washington officials have reportedly weighed restrictions on open-weight models (to curtail China’s influence).
There are so many conflicts of interest and it’s such a litany of potential abuses. Regulators draw direct parallels to Nvidia’s failed $40 billion acquisition of ARM. In that case, EU, UK, and US regulators blocked or challenged the deal because ownership of a neutral industry platform by a dominant hardware vendor posed an structural conflict of interest. This might be even worse for France and the space than what ARM represented. The way Nvidia has used its capital in recent years has been just chilling. That is if you have a shred of meritocracy and antitrust ideals left in you, which U.S. capitalism doesn’t really have much left of unfortunately honestly speaking. The days of a free market with real global competition are long gone in the Trump Era.
Nvidia was likely selling the world a lie with the Sovereign AI pitch. The EU has spent considerable political and financial capital trying to build "sovereign AI" and reduce reliance on American tech giants. Hugging Face is viewed in Europe as a crucial layer of open-weights infrastructure. Now that’s been stripped away by the very name that was championing it with expensive GPU sales so the U.S. could sell weapons to the likes of the Middle East and European Nations. Nvidia just stabbed France in the back, smiling all the while. Did Macron even notice do you think? Does it even matter.
This was a done deal a week ago and Nvidia actually did some bargaining it appears to get a better deal on the price. Hugging Face that barely made any money to begin with.
Nvidia must have Trump’s blessing to do whatever it wants because analysts and commentators have called the deal strategically logical for Nvidia (bolstering open models to drive more GPU demand and reduce reliance on a few closed-model labs that are building their own chips) but “headed straight into a minefield” of community trust and regulatory scrutiny. I don’t know about a minefield but can you trust any American company at this point? They are serving their nation and making mafia moves in the process.
This aggressive M&A shows us that we might be further along in the AI boom bust cycle than I thought. Nvidia knows that with Jensen’s relationship with Trump they can get away with anything so long as he’s still the President. Nvidia has cultivated a great and sprawling partner ecosystem. With Hugging Face who knows what it could accomplish? Nvidia reportedly scaled back its own cloud business, called DGX Cloud, about a year ago. Now it can re-emerge as a Software and LLM leader as well.
Fuck binding commitments to maintain hardware-agnostic platform neutrality as Europeans try to do, this is America folks. AI is being shaped by American values, cutthroat but with a velvet glove. Imperialistic but pretending like they really care. Now we know the playbook. Anything to block China, am I right?
Hugging Face raised $235 million in 2023 in a funding round that valued it at $4.5 billion. Did I mention it barely makes any revenue? Nvidia wants to assimilate and augment its role as steward and match-maker of AI. AI Bank, and all. With its compute, its hardware and its monopoly on your base. You need Nvidia.
How much revenue are we talking about? The Information reported annualised revenue above $150M in August 2026, up 50% in two months. That Open-source AI surge in 2026, Nvidia wants in. In Trump terms, China must be stopped. Ironic that the new Tycoon on the block is Taiwanese-American and so is AMD’s - not a coincidence by the way.
Go big or go home, Nvidia will now officially be the hub for all things Generative AI.
Most Americans won’t even be asking questions and don’t know/care that Tycoons control their future. Literally.
If you can monopolize and own AI developer platforms does that enable you to build even better open-source models yourself? Can you be owner, partner, pimp and the winner of the LLM game all at the same time? Nvidia is betting on it. Can you be hardware and software provider for your biggest customers? Can you skirt antitrust rules and defeat all conflicts of interests in an AI boom that has National Defense implications by kissing the ring? Yes, yes you can. You just have to be Jensen Huang.
Nvidia is taking on the vibrant home for the open model developer community for its own self-interests. It owns that developer experience now. All that data is now its property to leverage. The world and the future of AI will hereafter never be the same again.
In 2026 Hugging Face has also become a leading open-source ecosystem for Physical AI and world model related repositories and models. Physical AI and robotics is of great interest for Nvidia. While CUDA is a great moat, Nvidia wants to have deeper business moats even while charging customers what it likes on the most expensive GPUs and AI Chips in the world.
I cannot in good conscience assume Nvidia can remain a good actor of stewardship with this much power in both the hardware and software stacks governing and that Generative AI is building around and on. Jensen Huang is a popular figure and contrasts the Tycoon behavior of people like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others but is also in close collaboration with them and figures like Donald Trump, who seems especially fond of Jensen. How this American elite is pushing American AI on to the G20 is just incredibly aggressive and worrisome. Sam Altman has recently suggested that the use of AI is “non-negotiable”. That feels like an omen of things to come in how the U.S. will be pushing its Authoritarian version of what AI becomes. This will siphon economic value from other countries to the United States.
Generative AI could degrade the U.S. labor market while being inflationary for years to come
It’s hard to even find real human comments online any longer on the Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition. Hacker News, Reddit, and other platforms.
“A nearly $13 billion deal is not a side bet. It's a statement about where the market is going.” - CEO of CoreWeave (backed by Nvidia)
Michael Intrator understands (read full quote) the market is becoming more monopolistic as well apparently while he takes out debt guaranteed by Nvidia to scale his Neo Cloud and compute AI Infrastructure. U.S. executives (indebted to Nvidia) insister American owned open-source AI will boost meritocracy. What could go wrong as immigration has been completely purged under Trump and talent are taking or being forced to take early retirements?
Monopoly AI Capitalism with Characteristics of Mafia post Capitalism
Jensen Huang is now an AI Baron in 2026. Is that the future of America and AI we want? Where a few companies like Nvidia and Meta dominate open-weight models and developer ecosystems? Where European startups and talent are harnessed for American anti-Chinese geopolitics and competition? I’m not sure that’s how global innovation should be operating. I’m not sure that leads to a better world or is a good use of Capital or U.S. reserve currency status privilege (like that huge $40 Trillion debt).
Nvidia makes great GPUs and have terrific margins and dominant marketshare. But that doesn’t mean it should be the gatekeeper of how Open-source AI, world models and robotics develop.
At the G20 the Americans put up a united front: where Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk urged governments to avoid broad AI restrictions, arguing that excessive regulation could slow innovation and economic gains. Essentially BigTech lobbying for a world that is Pro-American where I regulation cannot hurt their AI monopolies and monolithic U.S. influence in the world. But is that the best way to conduct geopolitics and foreign relations, to give BigTech a seat at the table like this? Trump is out of his mind. This will only push people (consumers, voters and citizens inside and outside of the U.S.) to hate BigTech, Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street even more as wealth inequality accelerates.
Jensen Huang has shown you can hack capitalism while exploiting the power dynamics available to you. Including the Trump Administration. Just call it the “biggest shift in history” or something like that. Pretend that you are a Tycoon with a very big heart doing work for the entire planet. So this is what the new Nvidia is becoming?
Other countries and regions should be regulating AI more (not less) if they hope to retain any IP rights on their AI futures. The U.S. version of AI Supremacy could suppress the economies of other regions as we are seeing with Canada and Europe in the era of Trump level trade tariffs, threats and bullying. The U.S. weaponizing Tycoons and their corporations against the world is a really terrible idea and now Nvidia is involved in that. This is not a benevolent Tech dictatorship that is forming around the extraordinary capital advantages of BigTech Capex and Nvidia profits. These are unfair advantages of an AI authoritarianism that is forming.
Nvidia’s patterns seem both strategic and anti-competitive. Just like it’s morbid and precocious circular and vendor financing habits.
Note: this post was mostly human generated, can you tell from the rant tone?
Cannibalisations
Nvidia agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, valued at $4.5 billion in 2023. More than 200,000 companies use it to find and deploy models. This piece asks whether the biggest GPU maker should be custodian of that hub, including for the Chinese labs that release open weights there.
From the robotics side, Nvidia already publishes open physical-AI datasets and driving models on Hugging Face. It now owns the shelf where its own releases sit next to everyone else's.