Tech Brew Ride Home - Hugging Face Next?

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Hugging Face explored a sale at $13B+, keeping the AI M&A wave rolling. Trump scolded towns that reject data centers while Abbott said the industry dug its own grave, Fable 5 spending plateaued, and Apple cut 200+ jobs. Links Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest (Business Insider) Delangue has said Hugging Face is close to profitability and barely touched its 2023 round, and it turned down a $500M Nvidia investment at a $7B valuation earlier this year (TechCrunch) President Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Axios) Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" and deserve the backlash, after ordering an audit that has stalled roughly 1,800 projects (Fortune) Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (Financial Times) Nvidia plans to use its $6B licensing deal with Poolside to build one of the world's most powerful open-weight models, to compete with DeepSeek and Kimi K3 (The Wall Street Journal) Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Bloomberg) Subscribe to the ad-free feed.

Welcome to the TechBrew right home from Monday, August 24th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Hugging Face might be the next to sell, suggesting the long-anticipated AI M&A wave is coming. Trump's scolded towns that reject data centers while Governor Abbott said the industry dug its own grave. Fable 5, spending has plateaued and Apple is cutting 200 very specific jobs. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. now you can make your voice heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds, whether you hold a Vanguard fund

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Quote, the AI industry's next blockbuster acquisition may not be another model maker. HuggingFace, whose platform helps developers discover, share, and build AI models, has been exploring a sale that could value the company at $13 billion or more. The startup has been working with a bank to evaluate bidder's interest, and no deal has been reached yet, according to people familiar with the matter. Hugging Face is a platform where developers publish, share, and download various AI models. The talks show how valuable AI developer platforms have become as the industry matures. The startup was last valued at $4.5 billion in 2020 per pitchbook.

Investors include Lux Capital, Edition, and Salesforce ventures. Huggingface was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clement Dallong, Julian Chalmant and Thomas Wolfe. Rather than competing to build the next frontier model, companies like HuggingFace have become essential for developers who build with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others. Following Stripes Agreement to Buy AI Model Marketplace Startup OpenRouter for around $8 billion, interest in HuggingFace suggests investors are increasingly willing to pay premium prices for companies at the center of the AI ecosystem, even if they aren't building the models themselves, end quote.

And quoting TechCrunch. HuggingFace last raised in 2023, led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures, and others. On a recent episode of the TechCrunch Equity podcast, Hanging Face CEO Clem DeLong, said that the company was close to profitability and only recently started to touch the money that it raised three years ago, adding that the startup is thinking about how to optimize for, quote, long-term sustainability of the company. rather than short-term profits or fundraising maximization.

We're more in a unique position where we can keep creating value for the community and for AI builders, he said. The way DeLong has discussed the company's responsibility to the hugging face community raises questions over whether the startup is truly considering selling or is simply fielding offers for what has become a central pillar in AI infrastructure. We're building a platform for the community and they're trusting us with sharing their data and their models on the platform, so we have a long-term. term responsibility to them DeLong said on equity. More to the point, the company earlier this year

turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion, saying at the time that it didn't want a single dominant investor to sway decisions, end quote. We've been talking about how the backlash to data centers could become an interestingly potent political football, and that is seemingly coming to pass, quoting Axios. President Trump defended the expansion of data centers in an interview with his former fixer Michael Cohen that aired in full on Sunday. Trump told Cohen during their interview that the U.S. was leading China in AI by, quote, a lot, and that data centers were not taking power from the grid. They're making their own power plants. They're building the most beautiful. You've never seen power plants

like this, Trump said during the interview that was recorded last week. Communities that don't take a data center, they're making a mistake because data centers create tremendous amounts of jobs and money, Trump added. Trump's comments come as Texas Governor Greg Abbott said, data center companies dug their own grave and deserve the backlash they're facing after failing to win community support. Abbott has directed state regulators to make data centers pay the full costs of the electrical infrastructure they require, while Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro imposed restrictions and New York Governor Kathy Hochel ordered a one-year moratorium on hyperscaler data centers in that state. The Trump administration has taken steps to ease some environmental

requirements for data centers while pushing tech companies to cover more of the electricity costs associated with the AI buildout. Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance saying power plants not connected to the public grid aren't subject to the Clean Air Axe Acid Rain program, a move the agency said would expand opportunities for dedicated data center power generation, end quote. More on the Governor Abbott angle, because, you know, that's Texas. Also, he's a Republican. Quoting Fortune. The political data center backlash is gathering steam and turning bipartisan as Texas Governor Greg Abbott delivered his sharpest rebuke yet of the Artificial Intelligence Data Center industry on Sunday. They basically dug their own grave for the problem that's been caused for them,

and that's why they got the backlash they deserve, Abbott said in an interview on ABC News this week. The Republican governor argued that companies rushed facilities into communities with little advance notice or engagement, fueling anger over electricity demand, water consumption, and neighborhood disruption. The rhetorical shift has been accompanied by concrete regulatory action. this month, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to halt new grid connection approvals for data centers until regulators complete a, quote, comprehensive verification and audit of pending projects, according to the governor's office and Houston public media. The comments mark a striking reversal for a governor who spent

years courting the data center industry as the cornerstone of his effort to brand Texas, the epicenter of AI investment. They also land amid an unusual public rift with President Donald Trump, who has called Abbott's crackdown an economic mistake, and at a moment when Texas's dominance of the industry's pipeline is larger than Wall Street analysts had previously appreciated. Abbott's tone has shifted markedly since Data Center proposals began drawing organized resistance in towns from Abilene to Sulphur Springs. Residents have packed local planning meetings, filed petitions, staged protests, and pursued legal challenges against projects they say will strain power grids, drain water supplies, and generate constant noise.

The governor now attributes much of that backlash to the industry's own conduct. Gaining the support of people in local communities is essential, Abbott said, framing local buy-in as a prerequisite for future approvals. If you're a data center and you want to operate in Texas, you have to first get the approval of those in local communities. Public polling backs up the scale of the resistance Abbott described. A Gallup survey this year found seven of ten Americans opposed data centers being built in their local area with nearly half, strongly. opposed. A July Emerson College poll put opposition at 63% up 21 percentage points from December 2025, while a Reuters Ipsos survey in June found only 14% of Americans said they'd be comfortable living near one. After Abbott's call for an audit, roughly 1,800 data center projects are now stalled tied to interconnection requests totaling approximately 474 gigawatts, more than five times Aircott's all-time peak electricity demand, and by Abbott's account, driven roughly 90% by data centers, according to utility dive and Yahoo Finance. That interconnection Q figure measures something related to, but not identical with Apollo's

100-gagawatt plan capacity estimate. Aircuts number reflects raw grid connection requests, many of which will never be built, while Clean View's figure is meant to capture projects further along in planning. Abbott's office says the audit is necessary in part because fewer than 10% of data centers have been complying with existing state reporting requirements on power and water usage, according to press secretary Andrew Mahara lists, according to Newsweek. Some developers have already moved to fall in line. Abbott announced last week that powerhouse data centers, Corwieve, and emergent data centers had agreed to comply with the new standards,

while at least one prospective project chose to abandon construction plans rather than meet the requirements, according to the governor's office. Abbott has separately pointed to a meta-linked facility near El Paso, which sits outside the main Eracott grid, as a model project that intends to comply voluntarily per newsweek. Abbott's turn against the industry he once championed is part of a much broader political phenomenon. In races from Ohio to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, candidates in both parties are scrambling to distance themselves from data center projects. Their own leaders spent years courting. In Ohio, former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has spent millions branding Republican Senator John Husted, the face of data centers,

the National Republican Senatorial Committee to privately warn AI companies that a husted loss could could chill industry support nationwide. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro, who spent years courting data center investment from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, signed an executive order this month requiring local community approval before granting building permits after Republican challenger Stacey Garrity accused him of rolling out the red carpet for developers. In Wisconsin, GOP gubernatorial nominee Tom Tiffany is attacking his Democratic opponent as Data Center, David Crowley, while in Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul Al-Sayed, called for state and federal moratorium days before winning his primary and Republican.

Mike Rogers has since embraced a one-year moratorium of his own. More than 200 data centers are under construction or planned in competitive House districts, and 40 of the 69 most competitive districts nationwide have a data center either planned or under construction, according to a data center map analysis cited by Politico and Business Insider. Eight states have enacted legislation this year rolling back data center tax subsidies with 17 more considering similar measures, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities cited by Politico. Even Virginia, the nation's largest data center market by operating capacity, imposed a new consumption tax on data center's energy usage this year to help close a budget gap. Industry insiders describe the moment in stark terms.

Some are viewing it as an OS moment, one AI industry advocate told, Politico. If even Texas is turning against you, you've got a mounting problem, end quote. With this summer's record-breaking heat, it's hard to cool down enough to get a good night's sleep. That's where the pod comes in. The pod by eight sleep is a smart mattress cover that goes over your existing mattress and actively heats or cools each side of your bed independently. It connects to your wearable, analyzing your daily activity. Then it predicts how you'll sleep and adjusts the pod's temperature automatically. What I love about the 8th sleep is the simplest of things, the ability to be cool when it's

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in all sorts of ways, quoting the F-T. Anthropics, U.S. customers are using cheaper alternatives to its most powerful AI tool, raising questions about the group's high spending business model ahead of what is expected to be the biggest IPO of all time. Spending on Fable 5, Anthropics' largest and priciest model has plateaued at only about 11% of overall outlay on the company's tools, more than two months after its release, according to spending data from 70,000 companies collected by Payments Group Ramp. This breaks a pattern of corporate users defaulting to the most powerful models. Analysts and investors in Anthropics said the change was primarily driven by Fable's high price

and the fact that older models are capable of handling the bulk of business demands. If sustained, the shift could radically alter the business model of Frontier Labs, which have until now funneled the bulk of their multi-billion-dollar development spending toward training ever larger, more sophisticated models. Most people don't need to operate at the frontier, said Miles Clements, a partner at a cell, which has invested close to $1 billion in Anthropic, the period in which customers tended to choose only the frontier models was not a durable era, he added. Breakthroughs and intelligence remain essential to fulfill the company's loftiest promises, such as curing diseases and to attract the best researchers. But they will increasingly be showcases,

said Clements. The lower demand for Fable, which has seen a slower rate of take-up than previous cutting-edge releases, adds to the uncertainty for Anthropica ahead of its IPO, which investors anticipate will value the group at $2 trillion or more and could come as soon as next month. Anthropics' revenue in July undershot the most bullish expectations from investors who projected annualized sales would cross $80 billion. Anthropic told shareholders last week that its revenue last month hit $65 billion on an annualized basis up from $47 billion in May, end quote. Now, you might be asking yourself, why not get into the open weight game? Well, quoting the journal, Nvidia is planning to use a $6 billion deal it struck this week to build

one of the world's most powerful open-weight AI models, one that would compete with Chinese heavyweights like Deep Seek and Kimmy K-3, according to people familiar with the matter. The Chip Giant's licensing deal with the AI startup poolside is also set to present a direct challenge to frontier U.S. AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, since open-weight models are generally far cheaper to operate and allow easy customization. Although Nvidia counts big labs like OpenAI and Anthropic as some of its closest partners, the move reflects Chief Executive Jensen Wong's efforts to position Nvidia for success in multiple AI battlegrounds simultaneously, ensuring the company is able to hold onto its dominant market position.

Although Nvidia's Wong has long endorsed open weight models, which can be free to download and allow users to alter them for specific needs, the American AI industry has poured far more resources into proprietary or closed AI models which don't share their source code or numerical weights with developers. These include startups that have become household names like Anthraic and Open AI, as well as. as the research arms of established tech firms like Alphabet's Google. The failure of U.S. AI Labs to give priority to open source models has created concerns that businesses and countries around the world will turn to Chinese open weight models instead, end quote.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has cut GPD 5.6 Sol's API and credit prices by over 20% for the next three months to $4 per 1 million input tokens and $20 per 1 million output tokens. methinks Anthropic needs to rush through this IPO window as fast as it can. Finally today, remember the Apple Vision Pro. Yeah, no one else does really either, which probably leads to this news. Quoting Bloomberg. Apple is cutting jobs across teams responsible for the Siri Digital Assistant and the Vision Pro headset, part of an effort to focus on new devices and artificial intelligence.

Apple is also laying off employees in its intelligent systems experience, a team within its software engineering organization responsible for some of the AI features on its devices, according to people with knowledge of the matter. As part of the changes, the company is largely shutting down a Vision Pro team focused on gaming for the headset and reducing the size of a unit responsible for producing the device's immersive video content said the people who ask not to be identified. Altogether, the cuts affect more than 200 people with about 100 positions eliminated from the Vision Pro organization and another 100 from the Siri and software teams. The Siri reshuffling is tied to an upcoming AI-infused version of the Assistant, which is built on a new technical architecture.

That shift requires a change in the necessary expertise, prompting the company to eliminate a small number of existing roles, reallocate resources, and create new positions supporting the updated Siri. The changes to the Intelligent Systems Experience Team reflects an effort to reorganize work on AI-powered capabilities. As more groups bring AI functions to apps, features, and services, Apple is realigning teams to match priorities and accelerate development. The restructuring will eliminate some existing positions while creating new roles. The Vision Pro changes were described to employees as an effort to realign priorities based on how customers are using the device and to better direct resources toward other future products, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.