Welcome back. The main thing happening today is the $13 billion takeover interest circling Hugging Face. Live 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
Hugging Face is a platform developers use to publish, share and download AI models. According to Business Insider, it's now exploring a sale that could value it at around $13 billion. That would be close to triple its last valuation of $4.5 billion, set in 2023. It's also nearly double the $7 billion Nvidia reportedly offered last year.
Hugging Face has taken a different route to becoming an AI heavyweight. Rather than competing to build the next frontier model, it has positioned itself underneath those that do, hosting more than two million models, a million apps and half a million datasets from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta.
The potential sale would cap a busy stretch of dealmaking around the infrastructure beneath the models. Stripe agreed this month to buy model marketplace OpenRouter for around $8 billion, and the interest in Hugging Face points to a growing willingness to spend big on companies that have become central to the ecosystem.
We're diving into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
FRIDAY’S MOMENT
Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston came on the show to announce a $250 million Series A extension (and naturally the studio erupted).
"The most significant thing is we had Nvidia investing as well as Cisco." Nvidia has looked at Starcloud's work more closely than almost anyone, Johnston said, after the company flew the first H100 chip into orbit last November. The two are now building a version of Nvidia's Rubin chip made for space.
Phillip also discussed the sheer scale of the AI infrastructure crunch, arguing the US would need the equivalent of 50 to 100 new nuclear power stations within three years to keep up with demand. For orbital data centres to work, he admitted, launch costs need to come down about tenfold to compete with data centres on the ground.
Watch the full clip below.
FRIDAY’S BANGER OF THE DAY
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