Nvidia to Acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B — Deal Value Hides a Double Easter Egg
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04.09.2026 06:00
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2 min read
Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the leading platform for open-source AI models, for $12.9303 billion. The parties have signed a definitive agreement, and the unusually specific deal value turned out to be an intentional message: the startup’s founders hid two Easter eggs in the number 129303, referencing both companies involved in the takeover.
Unicode Magic and Hex Code
Following the announcement, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf challenged the community to figure out the hidden meaning behind the price tag. The first reference relates to character encodings: in the decimal system, the number 129303 corresponds to code point U+1F917 in the Unicode standard. That is the exact code assigned across all operating systems to the official Hugging Face emoji — 🤗.
The second part initially sparked debates online, with commenters trying to break down the number into dates and milestones from the chipmaker’s history. However, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue revealed the real answer in a comment to Business Insider. When converted into the hex color code #129303, the digits produce a deep shade of green — Nvidia’s signature corporate color.
Acquisition Terms and Platform Independence
While the agreement has been signed, the deal has not yet closed legally. According to Nvidia’s SEC filing, the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027 following antitrust regulatory reviews. Shareholders will receive around $11.9 billion of the total amount, with up to $1 billion earmarked for an equity retention program for key developers.
The community’s main concern was the open nature of Hugging Face, which hosts hundreds of thousands of machine learning models. In a post on the official Nvidia blog, the company emphasized that the platform will remain hardware-agnostic: there are no plans to turn it into a closed showcase for proprietary chips, and developers can continue to host and test architectures on accelerators from any manufacturer.
