Hugging Face has crossed over $150 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), experiencing a massive 50% growth surge over just a two-month span.
Does anyone else see the irony here?
8 replies (most recent on top)
You’re right that the MAG7 loop looks ugly and that $13B for ~$150M ARR is not a clean SaaS multiple. Nvidia isn’t buying a P&L. They’re buying the place developers pick models so more inference stays on their chips.
The SAS angle isn’t “we should have been Hugging Face.” It’s the clock. HF is about as old as Viya. They just added ~$50M ARR in two months. SAS is cutting 300 people while selling the same “we’re an AI company” story. The market is pricing speed and default status, not 50 years of enterprise contracts.
Plenty of better things to ding leadership for. This one still stings because “for that price they could buy SAS” isn’t only a joke.
Eventually the incestuous circular financing being perpetrated by the mag7 will come back to bite them. Who knows when "eventually" is, but right now creating your own models is not profitable. The math for NVDA/anthropic/openai/goog/orcl/amzn/msft just doesn't work. They're cash incinerators ATM and the delusional "runway" being touted for AI revenue growth STILL won't pay back the investments.
Moreover, once these companies start charging cost + margin for these models, that revenue will collapse. The broader market is not going to pay $400/mo for claude pro, or $13K/mo for the max plan.
I don't see how this pertains to SAS's business in any way, or is some sort of indictment of the company.
There's so much to criticize the leadership team over, this isn't it.
Moral of the story is the perception of value given the critical mass AI has reached and the accelerated potential cost of not capturing this opportunity. Otherwise, the multiple of revenue being floated for acquisition is insane.
What's even sadder is that HF is younger as a company than Viya is as a SAS architecture. This missed decade of opportunity pretty well predicts SAS' future if radical change doesn't happen immediately.
AI is devious and unethical. How terrifying!
Watch this! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WXm7Rf1bR2M
@br True. It could be built for much less than $13B.
Nvidia has plenty of cash, and must think it better to buy than to build, to acquire HuggingFace users quickly.
Why not just have AI create a new website, like HuggingMask, given software is a lowly commodity now? Surely, if nVidia builds it, someone will come.
For that price, they could buy SAS.
Should be no worse than Microsoft buying Github.