I think this is part of an open-source play. I'm not arguing your other points, I think they're true.

They're trying to mix up the competitive landscape(that doesn't impact their bottom line, and I don't think opensource is eating their lunch), so I don't think this is fake, at least that's my initial take.

I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Nvidia has hardly open sourced the nvcc compiler, yet no-one here is complaining about why it is closed source.

Modular on the other hand creates the Mojo compiler gets criticised for not open sourcing it immediately and now once they do, no-one cares anymore.

Huggingface was not just a target for open source, but as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

>No need to quote Linus Torvalds here

Evidently we should, because Linus has been more positive about Nvidia in the last 2 years [0]. I've been using the open driver for years now, for both gaming and CUDA.

[0] https://binarymusings.org/posts/talks/linus-on-ai-linux-in-k...

Nvidia releases some of the most open open weights models, Nemotron 3, which have the full training code open, and most but not all of the training datasets.

Nvidia is a big company. They are good about some things and bad about others.

I think they really do like open weights because they make some of the best hardware for training, and the more open weights models there are, the more people are training and fine-tuning them, mostly on Nvidia hardware.

I feel like Nvidia is one of the better choices for buying Huggingface. Not perfect, but definitely far from the worst.

I think it's a plausible play that keeps the AI boom in session for a year or two longer.

Or at least, $13b to stay at the head of the race (or keep the race running) must be worth it to someone's desk.

There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).

So it is a bit of a puzzling choice for what amounts to a pile of software, in my opinion. but I don't know shit.

NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

They even share many of their pre-training and even post-training datasets for Nemotron on HuggingFace; for example: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Nemotron-Post-Trainin...

Which other lab shares this?

Yes, there is no question NVIDIA wants to lock you into CUDA and their hardware. But also, they’ve consistently demonstrated the most openness when it comes to model training, datasets, and research; even before the LLM era (e.g. StyleGAN).

There’s also modelscope.cn (china’s huggingface) which is worth checking out. I would not be surprised if one day, we have to use China VPNs to download open weight models.

They need to switch to egrees free cloudflare R2!

The $13b doesn't go to hugging face's bank acct to pay for anything like S3 egress fees... It go to hugging face's owners' Bank accounts for them to do anything else. New cohorts of billionaires and centi millionaires getting minted.

Totally, and as long as they don't turn on the AWS NAT Gateway, they'll be just fine.

I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)

I don't think they passed on the 4.5 billion. They still raised it in 2023 with investors like Alphabet etc. They turned Nvidia *earlier this year* for the $7 billion valuation deal. It makes sense if they were angling for an acquisition.

This is the article you are referring to is this but your facts are wrong: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...

Yeah I'm afraid they will only keep cuda support for their software. Good thing it's all Open source

Well, if they didn't want a dominant investor, they didn't get one, they got acquired.

Seems the opposite of a reversal to me.

Reversal would be "valued at 7B then valued at nothing", this is more like "nah, we want more" then "nah, we want more" then "yes, that's what we want :)".

If the acquisitions of late tell us anything at all, it's that Nvidia wants to be a vertical AI company, not a hardware or gaming company.

Truer words were never spoken. This is painfully true.

The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc

That is a very good point. I will set aside some storage and download those models that I think are most at risk from a corporate clean-up action.

To be fair, this is the best thing that can happen for the founders. I don't blame them.

You've sold out when you became VC Funded... It's just a matter of how long the free punch lasts.

NVidia has reasonable incentives to keep things open indefinitely, it wants people to use it's GPUs

Acquisition of GitHub let to increased downtimes, but also to unlimited private repos for the free tier.

Nvidia is promoting "unmetered intelligence". Jensen wants everyone to have a spark dgx with an nvidia chip in their home.

Sounds like it was just too much money for the stakeholders to refuse

Apple buying Workflow (became Shortcuts). Its users have a better, faster tool and got it soon after acquisition. And it has many more users now.

> as a force to have open weight models run better on Nvidia against the rest.

this is the crux - if nvidia makes it so that open weights end up running better on nvidia hardware than competitor's, then it's going to prevent hardware innovation and competitiveness in the entire sector.

It's like as tho General Motors buys out oil refinery to make gas for all, but the gas somehow runs smoother in GM cars.

The VC capital for AI is probably drying up. Now the question is: who will buy OpenAI and Anthropic?

They will just download them from modelscope

NVIDIA is a lot more than a “lab”.

What would be the worst three?

It was either they (literally) sell out or enshittify. Choose your poison. Hosting and running LLMs is an expensive business to be in. There wasn't any good ending to this story if the original investors were to be made whole.

What, are you expecting them to just work for good vibes?

Pretty sure Nvidias dream is that OpenAI and Anthropic get into a hacking war using Nvidia cards.

The problem for them is that the leading provider of training and inference is actually AWS...

I don't think nvda has ever pushed the idea that ai is too powerful for regular people.

That's the anthropics and openais of the world.

He definitely sounds more pragmatic than before, which is, in a sense, more positive.

> This is actually one of the benefits brought by AI; it has made Nvidia a good participant in the Linux kernel space. [...] Now, when Linux is so important for AI clouds, Nvidia suddenly cares very much about Linux.

Did you just quote an LLM as a citation? That's not how citations work.

> NVIDIA is one of the most open labs.

Of course they are. They're commoditizing their complement.

I want to own the hardware, not play around in an nvidia fiefdom full of nvidia rules.

> There's only $50b in datacenter buildout nationally (Source: Gemini, 2026).

Your reference lacks authority, veracity, and reproducibility.

I assume it's because nvidia is a hardware company that produces world class hardware, and it's a compiler to target that.

Whereas mojo is a general purpose language, and we're absolutely spoiled for choice on modern languages with open source compilers.

I'm not saying it's fair or right, I still think mojo is neat, but isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.

> no-one cares anymore.

possibly because it took qualcomm buying them to make that happen.

They’re buying a brand, some employees, and some momentum — not any of their software. HF probably does have propriety goodies to make it all run efficiently, but certainly not a billion dollars worth, much less 13!

The Government plans to regulate open source ai. Nvidea is dependent on the Government to back loans, provide property, and make laws in their favor. Now they have ownership of what the Government wants to control. A perfect wedge they can use to get more from the Government.

We're entering consolidation

They have various paid services that relate to AI—paid inference hosting; paid accounts aimed at AI development with GPU rentals [credits plus paid overages, I believe], more private storage and public storage than free accounts; and many of the community a and some other benefits on individual/team/enterprise tiers; additional paid storage above the base quotas for the paid account tiers; on demand rentals of HF managed containers on GCP and AWS, and some other things.

I think this is good.. They have incentives to keep things free to keep people using their GPUs. I think that's one of the least enshittifying outcomes possible

> That’s at least a plus. I will happily burn through as much VC money as they will give me to tinker with my projects.

The era of VC-funded home-delivery recipe boxes is still my favourite.

If GLM-5.3 was truly trained and ran on Chinese chips, we'll have to ask what the business model of Nvidia itself is soon :)

Nvidia is a public company. What VC money?

ondemand cloud? b2b?

Alibaba already has modelscope and their own chips, and qwen models. Nvidia is doing the same with chips, huggingface and nemotron models

If they are mostly paid in NVDA stock and NVDA is also valued at 40x revenues or whatever insane multiple then it makes sense.

> Here have some of my monopoly money I can print and come join us at Nvidia!

If HF didn’t exist, model releases would likely have been on torrents like Linux iso’s back in the day.

Same reason why GitHub was acquired for $7.5B at $250 million ARR which is 30x revenues:

VCs could not see any other reason to raise more money and Huggingface was not growing as fast as they thought to justify the valuation or the next fundraise.

So they might as well get Nvidia to save them from the VCs pressurizing them.

> what are some alternatives

good old torrents

Yes. Great for devs, for a while. Awful for overall competition and industry's health.

I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.

Edit: antitrust regulators' job has just begun -- we'll see how this deal gets adjudicated by the FTC (if at all).

True, but better nvidia than any other big tech contender. Nvidia has a very strong business incentive to make huggingface thrive, whereas pretty much everyone else has the opposite incentive.

I guess we may have to start paying to download models.

Or perhaps they will start throttling downloads for free users.

I don't know what they business case is, it might be to shut them down: I suspect good free models on local hardware is a threat to Nvidia's investments in OpenAI/Anthropic.

Didn’t we just witness it? Become a critical ecosystem player then get acquired based on the value of that position.

Yes, this is ironic - it was the tinkerers using CUDA on cheap graphics cards that made Nvidia stuff useful in constrained academic environments.

True about Intel and ECC, but AMD now does similar things, even with their consumer CPUs and chipsets.

These three companies now make very sure that consumer products can never canibalize those juicy data center profits - so they make sure to limit what the consumer segment can do.

Isn't this pretty much the model for any tech company? Rush to get MVP released, stoke the hype, cash in on FOMO.

Somewhere, there’s a slide deck that shows future revenue going hockey stick.

Yeah this is the "early netflix" era. Take advantage while you can and plan for the future.

it's literally the GitHub for AI

The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.

Overall GitHub still got significantly worse since the acquisition. Downtime was essentially zero before.

It'd be really nice if I could use my egpu 4090 on my macbook pro..

Yea, my bet is that there is quite a long list of money bags sitting behind the leadership team that will weigh in if the offer is juicy enough.

... Which gitlab already had before github. And still does.

Maybe but they make their real money in data centers. Certainly, they want to have fingers on every trend. Owning something the Government wants to control gives you more access to trade repression of open models for more Government favors and money.

It's a clever move if that's what they're doing. They're restricted in China, and are likely to face stiff competition from Chinese chipmakers in the coming years. Acquiring the largest repository of trainable models and ensuring they run better on Nvidia hardware is probably one of the few moves they have for keeping ahead of the competition. I mean, it would be terrible for the consumer, but it does make me think that NVDA is a decent investment.

of course it is

works fine for now

whats nvidia gonna do except make it worse?

usually buyouts go something like this:

1 buy company

2 fire various people

3 enshittify

hugging face even said they didnt want to accept a 500 million dollar investment from nvidia, because they didnt want nvidia to run the ship.

instead they sell it... guess who'll run the ship?

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/hugging-face-reportedly-in...

There are always torrents, which would seem to be a fine way to distribute models.

It also means that finding models that aren't "approved" will be dealt by other websites.

If you can't beat them, buy them. Hallmark of late-stage capitalism.

good or bad, it comes down to a financial decision. Nvidia was willing to offer the highest bidding price, and HF was willing to sell.

We need small companies worldwide, developing the things huggingface does. The us china and Europe dominate while the rest of the world sits by idly. Torrent and seed ai models. It's not piracy

lol “Everything you said is correct but you’re wrong because I’m thinking about something other than what you were talking about”

2026 equivalent of “my Mama told me”

Yeah, the price is weird as fuck.

We can stop with these weak excuses since AMD and Intel have done more for open source than Nvidia has, including their GPU drivers for Linux.

Nvidia on the other hand has not and the best they have done is a bunch of closed-source blobs which they do more closed source releases than the rest.

Mojo is open source and targets all GPU architectures for their compiler regardless of the vendor and nvcc targets their own (and both that and CUDA are closed source).

So this is directly an apples to apples comparison.

Even worse is that Gemini's knowledge cutoff is still Jan '25.

It came to me in a dream.

Was Workflow available on every platform running on every hardware provider?

The public

Issue is that llama.cpp is the best way to run models on hardware that isn't nvidias.

Linus Torvalds: 'Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with'

His other comments on Nvidia often contain expletives.

Vertically integrated monopolies naturally have aligned in incentives for themselves, which allows more capture which turns out bad for customers. Whether it is a monopoly is an open question.

We also have modelscope.cn, I'm sure that one won't get acquired

According to The Information, it seem it's finalized? https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-op...

As someone who've played video games and obsessed over graphics cards long before this all started, don't get your hopes up.

Isn't it super easy for the community to just replace HuggingFace? Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models? Why is it even worth anything?

I think they will be, Nvidia has released open source model that also included the data it was trained on. I think they are the only ones that have done that.

"That's not how citations work." (Dude on the interwebz, 2026)

But more seriously, this is my first time seeing that as well, and I'm not sure I like it. Citing an LLM is a little like citing Wikipedia to me, you cite the primary source the LLM is quoting directly, not the secondary source.

nothing stopping you from doing that

We are so used to these numbers being thrown around in the AI era that something one needs a reminder that this is 13 billion, not million. Insane exit by HF.

Just say you don't know.

Mojo was partially open source before Qualcomm bought them, and they were going to do open source it anyway.

Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?

> I think the federal antitrust regulators are asleep.

Have been for a long time. All of the big techs should have been broken up long ago.

That doesn't make much sense to me. Companies don't just buy companies for absurd multiples out of the niceness of their heart.

In the case of GitHub, it was likely for data reasons + wanting to own where developers do work (VScode + Github).

In the case of HuggingFace, honestly not sure as I'm not familiar enough with their business. But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate. When you're desperate, you sell for less not more.

I see the opposite — NVIDIA is aiming to commoditize the model layer and push open models that are tuned to run on NVIDIA hardware.

There's over 3 million models on HuggingFace. So many quants. I'd imagine less than 0.5% would actually be seeded.

File hosting isn’t that hard to replicate though. Even if they start charging people will just set up torrents for the files or lists of mirrors.

Unless I’m missing something, this feels like Nvidia having more money than they know what to do with.

NVidia has been expending energy helping improve local models and inference platforms for them targeting NVidia GPUs; good free models that users can run locally rewards Nvidia’s investment in product lines for local inference (DGX, RTX PCs, etc), as well as—given their continued dominance in the space—the premium over competitors of their consumer and workstation GPUs.

Maybe everyone will migrate to Hugging Bay for downloading models via torrent?

Maybe they're trying to see how big the market actually is before considering shutting it down, maybe or getting lawyers and politicians to try and outlaw or restrict open models if they see a big enough opportunity.

Especially when all major labs are building their custom inference chips.

Except for during Biden, they've been asleep for almost 50 years.

I’m asking more to work out what is the basis of this valuation. Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.

I'd honestly prefer that. I'm usually on 5g if not 4g and pulling models is an absolute nightmare when I basically have to use HF and even with a token getting throttled. Although I have a pretty unique use case. Pulling wads of 5gb tensor files over cellular is painful.

You can torrent and seed these models via torrenting. They are not piracy so there's no problem hosting them besides maybe not having enough bandwidth

That means we will torrent these ai models. They are not pirated so there's no problem doing so

Curvature and convexity matters even in "hockey-stick" models =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NufJ7g63KSY

Possibly, but they were profitable already.

Counter point is China can afford to keep pumping out free models for long enough to crash the AI industry, As well as spin up memory production.

Its likely in the near future we will be able to buy 128gb mac minis and run local AI for free.

Github was acquired for $7B. It's hard for me to see how HF is worth almost double Github.

Linus isn't wrong but at the same time NV has shipped more compute than AMD and Intel combined to consumers. The kind of performance I get out of a modest outlay never ceases to amaze me.

Not if they can't indefinitely contain ram and SSD procurement. And they can't and the Market already showed with specex that they are unwilling to float these fly by night outrageous 'investments' onto institutional holders.

Institutional holders mass revolted at spacex getting into the basket.

AI costs more than having people do the work. Q2 CFO reaction proved that.

This isn't vertical integration. This is a commoditize your complements play and that does benefit customers. Nvidia benefits from supporting the open model ecosystem, if models are a commodity the gpus become what's scarce.

> Isn't it pretty much just a repo/index for open-weight models?

No, its not just a repo/index (they also have training, inference hosting, and they develop/maintain a bunch of core AI infrastructure software), and even if it was just a repo/index, replacing a bug centralized repo/index that used by an large community isn’t trivial.

Then use that as the link.

Everything I can find online is referring to this one source. That doesn't tell me if it's happening or not.

Network effects. It's like a social network for LLM nerds as well as hosting and rating models, etc.

I’m not sure your point, sorry.

> they were going to do open source it anyway.

uh huh.

> Was NVCC or CUDA ever open source since the lifetime of its development?

you ever ask Nvidia why? i did.

It's already part of Alibaba, which has its own incentives. So does kaggle with Google. Civitai is neutral but it is mostly nsfw even though they don't show it outright. Torrenting is the Best way

Are you joking? They just bought HF for $13bill and didn’t break a sweat. They are dominant and spreading.

Was looking for this comment, the tech world has gotten completely insane with ”valuations”. I would love to hear why it was 13 and not 5. It would still be completely insane at 5 billion, but someone though they should add another 8…

In fairness, most of those comments were made before Nvidia capitulated in the EGLStream war and released open kernel modules.

Handing out digging spots if you are the shovel manufacturer sounds reasonable.

as gamers, we got burnt by nvidia way too many times. I'm still holding grudge over shutting down 3dfx.

It’s the formatting and formality that bother me. Say “I looked it up with Gemini,” don’t give me some weak attempt at “proper citation” to legitimize the bare minimum effort you put in.

Not just a repo/index but they also offer reasonably-priced compute, with a free tier not to sniff at, on which to run the models.

Except when they have less than 16 gb of ram?

A Wikipedia link can be nice when you get several different sources provided.

Risk management.

Nvidia has a market cap of $5T USD today, and a decent chunk of that is due to LLM speculation.

Does Nvidia want their stock price to be at risk of being tanked by a download service being in the news? No, they want to make sure the party keeps going and is under their direct supervision, and part of that is making sure Hugging Face isn't bought by a competitor or runs out of money.

I am on the same boat, I live in a small Himalayan village. I have 2x5G based devices and one Wireless bridge (Ubiquiti LiteBeam M5) for a local broadband. Generally I get 50 Mbps, sometimes up to 100 Mbps

They make it easy to run models. The models have to run on hardware somewhere.

Now that you mention sleeping. I imagine one could do cool sleeping startups that clone something but exist only on paper. The sleeper startup is only launched the moment some ham fisted mega corp aquires the original and all the customers are looking for a way to abandon ship.

Interesting ideas, maybe the real open alternative will indeed be torrents.

Can't buy a decent modern Intel gpu to run AI on because of nividias "donation"

This is like saying GitHub or Google just gives away everything for free

Lina Khan @ the FTC was the best thing about the Biden administration, for me.

Talking about profit is so passé in the new economic paradigm. The rules have changed— it’s about how much a company is worth. Get with the times.

–Some guys in every bubble I’ve witnessed.

> Why would Nvidia spend $13B for what seems to be a services that gives things away for free.

To stop that! Literally. To stop those services being free.

Why would China want to crash the AI industry? Their goal is not to damage the United States, necessarily. Their goal is to have the best domestic AI on the planet. They intend to do that through the way that they dominate every other industry: good enough quality at a much greater scale.

If we survive, that is.

GitHub was acquired for 10B in 2026 dollars. And software on HF requires quite a bit more hardware expenditure to run.

Sales volume has no correlation with how good a company is for an ecosystem. See Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Sony, and so on.

Why waste keystrokes when less do trick?

As long as the spots continue to be compatible with shovels from other shovel manufacturers

Nvidia is indeed a terrible company when it comes to open source, etc. however, as someone who has been gaming on desktop hardware since the 6xxx card days, Nvidia hardware has always worked. I switched to Linux full time since the 2XX days (maybe it was the 280 gtx?) and never had a lot of the problems everyone else got on Linux (using only the closed source drivers).

Why would Nvidia destroy the first place we all look for models to load on our Nvidia hardware?

3dfx was going through bankruptcy

I think Russ Hanneman calls it a "pure play" type of company. He put radio on the internet, so he would know.

This gets mentioned a lot, but the most valuable companies, by orders of magnitude, have the most profit, by orders of magnitude.

I miss the Biden administration

I think failing to take advantage of the charisma of both Lina Khan and Janet Yellen, and not making them public-facing economics gurus like Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers historically were, was a huge tactical mistake by Biden.

Not really. GitHub has a strong platform of paying customers and a solid product that’s hard to replicate.

Google is obvious.

Hugging Face is a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off.

I dunno. You can argue over whether they're overpaying, but it's not like Huggingface is Clinkle. They hit $150 million in ARR this year, they have tons of runway, and according to reports, have just started to even burn the money they raised a few years ago.

I get that it's fun to be glib about the stupidity of tech elites and investors in general, but Huggingface have been pretty open about their financials and are, in my opinion as a practitioner in the field, one of the most responsible orgs in our space. They've been a pillar of open source ML for years now and have made a very positive impact on our ecosystem.

Nvidia is getting a real business generating revenue, and the center of the universe for open models. Both seem like pretty valuable attributes, from Nvidia's perspective.

for 6 months?

NV is a very different beast from all of those. I have yet to regret buying any of their products and I wouldn't touch your list with a stolen 10' pole.

NVIDIA introduced programs like The Way It's Meant to be Played, optimizing major game titles specifically for NVIDIA architecture, which made competitions like AMD cards underperform in critical releases.

I'm old enough to remember.

That's a sad thing to have to say, but yeah.

Likewise, their hardware has been rock solid and very performant for me. I bought most of my current setup second hand and they've been going strong for years now.

Whether you realize it or not Hugging Face's monetization is just as obvious as GitHub's

Yellen was objectively the dumbest Treasury Secretary ever. When everyone and their dog realized inflation was getting out of control, she thought it was transitory. She literally gets an F- as an economist.

And some former Roomba employees may have thoughts about Kahn.

150 million a year? Why, at that rate NVidia will make their money back in just 86 years.

I miss every administration back to Roosevelt.

Large numbers of people outside of the United States probably do.

They hit 150 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

Pretty nice dangling side features apparently.

Amd and Intel have the same programs.

I fail to see how this is a problem?

AMD could’ve done the same.

Solid point. I'm sure Nvidia went into this deal expecting completely flat growth and no other benefits to their core business. Sorta like how Meta never increased Instagram's revenue from $0 and is still waiting for it to pay off that billion dollar acquisition price.

Or like GitHub, which was generating something like 200 million in ARR and had never hit profitability when Microsoft bought it for $7.5 billion back in 2018. I'm sure it has come as nothing but a happy surprise to Microsoft that GitHub generated $1 billion in 2023. They had initially penciled it in for 38 years til ROI.

The company's name was iRobot, not Roomba.

I spent a little time working there around 2017. Whatever you're implying my former colleagues' thoughts on the subject are (or mine, for that matter), you're probably wrong.

Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences.

IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided.

Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.

That still leaves the company valued at 86 years of revenue

China and Russia are loving things right now.

I miss him from inside the United States too.

But they don't/didn't have the same level of market share as Nvidia, particularly in the PC gaming market. Nvidia had 65%-85% market share, and still worked with game studios to make sure their competitions failed. That's the opposite of good stewardship that's all I'm saying.

iRobot is now 100% owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics of China. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726...)

This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.

These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.

E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.

I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.

Absolutely none of this makes sense and the thing that amazes me is how long it has continued. Future historians will just laugh at how stupid and obvious the crash was.

Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.

Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?

Yeah, great point. Nvidia could potentially be overpaying. Not sure how that equates to Huggingface being "a file download mirror with a couple of side features dangling off".

Just wait until you hear that Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, when it was generating no revenue.

You are being disingenuous.

They worked with studios to optimize games for their hardware. I don’t think they went around sabotaging other companies hardware. They did what was good for them.

Why did competition not do the same?

Of course Amazon would have changed that. You would go on Amazon and search for "robot vacuum" and Amazon would put iRobot at the top of the results. Review manipulation on the platform would be trivial.

Amazon could email/push notification/text customers asking for reviews of iRobot vacuums but then not do the same for competing vacuums, skewing their reviews higher (asking for reviews boosts ratings by gathering opinions from happy customers who usually don't bother writing a review). Competing brands potentially don't even have your contact information to ask for a review.

Go on Amazon right now and search for "usb cable." There's a giant banner at the top that recommends the Amazon Basics brand, three across horizontally, which on my desktop monitor takes up nearly 50% of the screen real estate. Then below it are the Anker cables that you're more likely to be looking for.

They would have almost certainly been manipulating pricing on them as well. For example, they could take the strategy of lowering the price of the vacuums to break even or sell as a loss leader, but use them as a data-gathering robot in your house to help Amazon sell more of everything else. They could make their Alexa smart home platform preferential to iRobot or lock out competing models.

Robot vacuums are a consumer goods category that is heavily skewed toward Amazon.com as the place of purchase compared to other retailers.

I think "zombie brand owned by a Chinese company" is actually preferable, yes. They still operate and sell vacuums competing with the other robot vacuums on the market, and they aren't in service as household data collection bots for a monopoly e-commerce platform.

I don't think the ownership of the company being foreign or domestic is very relevant to the FTC's goal of preserving positive trade conditions. Would we think the iRobot situation was a bad outcome if iRobot was purchased by a foreign company we view more positively like Miele? We only think of it negatively due to anti-Chinese bias. iRobot being Chinese-owned is almost certainly the best possible outcome for preserving the amount of competition in the market.

Yes, that's a very good company to be the owner of iRobot, because they are just a robot factory and not a near-monopoly e-commerce retailer.

They are essentially on equal footing with other robotic vacuum manufacturers. iRobot didn't go out of business or get absorbed into a larger company lowering competition in the marketplace.

It's also not the FTC's job to ensure that companies, especially ones with zero/trivial national security or domestic labor force value, remain under domestic ownership. Amazon itself is not really a "domestic" company, it's publicly traded. Anyone from any non-sanctioned country can buy shares of Amazon.

While it's probably easier to say this in retrospect, they were eliminating a direct competitor to their core business. Something so advantageous it should have been blocked by regulators.

I can't see this as being as good of a purchase, especially when it's 13x the price of what was seen as an absurdly large amount back then.

You are very good at bringing up irrelevant numbers and missing the forest for the trees