Key points

  • NVIDIA (NVDA) has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported on August 26. Nothing is signed and both companies declined to comment. If it closes, it would be NVIDIA's largest deal ever.
  • Kevin Durant put $100,000 into Hugging Face's 2018 seed round and $150,000 into the $15 million Series A a year later through Thirty Five Ventures (35V). After dilution, that $250,000 is reported to be worth roughly $60 million at the deal price — about a 240-fold return.
  • On our Form 4 record, the only NVIDIA insider activity this month is two director equity awards and a 500,000-share gift. Not one open-market purchase.

Strip the athlete out and the Hugging Face headline is what this site tracks every day: a small cheque, written early, by someone with a view the market did not have. Durant's cheque was private. An insider's open-market purchase is the public version of the same act.

The deal: a model hub for the company that sells the chips

Hugging Face is the repository where most open-source AI models are published and fine-tuned. The Information reported the $12.9 billion price; CNBC and TechCrunch matched it. The company's last priced round, in August 2023, valued it at $4.5 billion, with NVIDIA already an investor.

Annualised revenue is reported at about $150 million, so the deal values Hugging Face at roughly 86 times sales. The logic is strategic: owning the platform where models are distributed puts NVIDIA one layer above the silicon. It also invites the regulatory scrutiny that follows a dominant supplier buying its customers' marketplace.

The Durant maths

Durant and partner Rich Kleiman run 35V, a portfolio of more than 100 companies including Coinbase and Robinhood. Hugging Face was one of the earliest cheques.

The reported $60 million assumes the deal closes at $12.9 billion and already accounts for dilution. Two caveats apply: the deal is reported, not signed, and one position at 240x says little about the other hundred. Even so, the stake would exceed a full season of Durant's two-year, $90 million Houston Rockets contract.

What NVIDIA's own insiders have filed

Across the NVIDIA Form 4 filings on our record this month, reviewed by InsiderBuying.com, there has not been one open-market purchase by an officer or director:

  • August 10 — director Suzanne Nora Johnson received two equity awards totalling 2,410 shares. Awards are compensation.
  • August 5 — director Tench Coxe filed a gift of 500,000 shares, worth roughly $106 million at the current price. A gift is neither a sale nor a purchase.

This is why NVIDIA carries no Insider Score on our platform: the score exists only where there are qualifying open-market buys to measure. At a $5.1 trillion market capitalisation, that absence is structural, not bearish.

How to read it

Durant's return came from seeing a company before anyone could buy it. The public-market equivalent is an officer or director spending their own cash on their own stock, disclosed on Form 4 within two business days. That filing is the small early cheque, made visible. Our Premium alerts flag those filings the day they land.

Audit it yourself: NVIDIA's filing history, today's open-market buying on Top Insider Scores, and the IQS Screener.