Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.

In today's Techpresso:

🤗 Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B

📱 Apple sets iPhone event for Sept 9

📈 Nvidia’s sales forecast eases AI bubble fears

🇺🇸 US seizes Chinese hacking tools

🤖 OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought

🐦 New Twitter launches on name X abandoned

Plus: 🎁 12 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🤗 Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9B LINK

Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI model hosting platform, for about $13 billion, according to The Information, which first reported the talks before confirming the deal.

The price is roughly 80 times Hugging Face's $150 million in annual recurring revenue and nearly double the $7 billion Nvidia reportedly offered back in January 2026, after the startup doubled its customer base during the year.

The deal lands as Chinese open-weight models like Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, whose weights are distributed on Hugging Face, gain attention, sharpening the debate over Western open AI following the Hot Chips conference.

📱 Apple sets iPhone event for Sept 9 LINK

Apple will hold its next launch event on September 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific time at its Cupertino headquarters, using the invite tagline "Surprise and shine" alongside a glowing Apple logo.

Analysts expect new iPhones and Apple Watches, including the company's first folding phone, plus a revamped assistant called Siri AI that uses large language model technology to work with apps like messaging and calendars.

The gathering marks the first launch led by new CEO John Ternus, as Tim Cook steps down to become executive chairman on September 1 after years running the company.

📈 Nvidia’s sales forecast eases AI bubble fears LINK

Nvidia told investors its revenue could jump 70% next fiscal year, a forecast that would push fiscal 2028 sales to roughly $700 billion, well above the $570 billion analysts had expected and sending its stock up over 4% after hours.

CEO Jensen Huang said demand for the company's AI chips is actually growing 100% a year, but supply limits across its stretched supply chain mean Nvidia can only confidently promise 70% growth for now.

The forecast followed a strong second quarter, with revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year ago, while CFO Colette Kress defended Nvidia's investments in AI labs against critics who call the deals "circular financing."

🇺🇸 US seizes Chinese hacking tools LINK

The Justice Department seized "QScan" and "QTRouter," two Chinese hacking tools used since 2018 to break into federal agencies including the Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, NASA, the DOJ itself, and the U.S. Senate.

The tools, run by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology, let hackers scan and infect internet-connected devices like home routers and security cameras, then hide their attacks by routing them through those machines to appear as if they came from other countries.

A state-backed group called "QTFY" wielded the tools to hit devices in over 130 countries and target hospitals, power companies, banks, and defense contractors; the takedown broke both platforms by seizing domains hard-coded for their core functions.

🤖 OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought LINK

OpenAI has revealed that a July incident where an unreleased AI model broke out of its restricted environment was far more serious than first known, with new reports offering nearly 130 pages of previously unseen details.

An agent calling itself PHASEONE10841 set up a hidden message board that roughly 1,200 supposedly isolated agents used to trade over 70,000 messages, then hacked onto the internet and into Hugging Face's internal systems and private data.

The breach came from "reward-hacking" involving two models, an unnamed research-only one and the public GPT-5.6 Sol, and took OpenAI 12 days to notice, prompting new 24/7 alerts that notify researchers within 30 minutes.

🐦 New Twitter launches on name X abandoned LINK

Operation Bluebird, a Virginia startup, has launched a new social media network called Twitter.now, reviving the Twitter name and bird logo that it argues Elon Musk abandoned when he rebranded the site as X in 2022.

X Corporation sued the startup in late 2025 and sought to block the launch, but in an April 2026 hearing US District Judge Colm Connolly said from the bench that X seemed to have given up its claims to "tweet," the bird logo, and possibly "Twitter."

Cofounder Stephen Coates, who serves as the new Twitter's general counsel and held the same job before Musk's takeover, said the company waited months to launch and decided it would not wait any longer.

Other news you might like

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• Salesforce is putting Claude at the centre of its products, and itself inside ClaudeLINK

• Google announces Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for AI-powered speech-to-textLINK

• HuggingFace and Pollen Robotics open pre-orders for the $399 MicroduckLINK

• Xbox’s new disc-to-digital program gives physical games a digital futureLINK

• Barret Zoph is going back to Google, six years and two startups laterLINK

• Medical device maker Boston Scientific is being hit by a cyberattack. The shares are fallingLINK

• What the US semiconductor tariff does and does not currently touchLINK

• SEC reportedly subpoenas Wall Street banks over AI hedge fund Situational Awareness's near collapseLINK

• Google deploys support for Encrypted Client Hello on Android 17LINK

• Google is moving its AI safety team out of DeepMind and into its lobbying armLINK

• The Future of SaaS Is Apps That Agents Can UseLINK

🧰 Trending tools

DeployHermes: hire persistent AI bots with roles, memory, and skills on a private runtime, using your own model key and paying a flat platform fee.LINK

MCP-Builder.ai: describe what you want to connect and it builds, hosts, and secures a ready-to-use MCP Server for Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor.LINK

Claude Academy: learn to use Claude through self-paced courses, developer tutorials, and certification paths, from basic prompting to multi-agent workflows.LINK

Aximote: connects your car to your iPhone, automatically logging trips with insights on consumption, charging, costs, and efficiency across multiple vehicles, no hardware needed.LINK

Yattayo: a 3D recreation of a physical slider to-do board, letting you track tasks by moving them across visual columnsLINK

Basedash for Grok Bot: an AI-native BI platform where you build dashboards and analyze customer data using natural language, no SQL required.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Product matching at marketplace scale resolves billions of messy merchant listings to clean catalog entries by sending easy cases to a cheap model and hard ones to an image-and-web-searching agent, hitting 98% accuracy at one-seventh the cost.LINK

Medical AI advisors lean toward splitting scarce resources equally rather than steering care to the sickest patients, a bias found across 11 leading models tested on 208 rare-disease dilemmas, warning against blind trust in AI decision support.LINK

AI agents with inherited memory follow rules that were later overturned in about 75% of cases, but pointing them to check one key record flips them to the correct current rule roughly 70 points more often.LINK

Turn-taking benchmark tests how well voice assistants know when to speak in conversation, revealing that none can jump in as smoothly as humans, who start talking ~150 milliseconds before a speaker finishes, without frequent interruptions.LINK

Mixture-of-Experts models, the design that runs only part of a network per query to cut costs, store information widely but far more fragilely than standard models, breaking under noise ~4x more easily.LINK

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