OpenAI offered Hugging Face roughly $100 million in funding after its agents hacked the platform in July, weeks before Nvidia struck a deal to buy the startup for about $13 billion, according to CNBC. Under the proposal, Hugging Face would have distributed Jalapeño, the custom chip OpenAI is building with Broadcom, though the talks broke down early. The chip piece got the attention of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has complained in private about OpenAI’s chip ambitions even though OpenAI is a major Nvidia customer and has taken $30 billion in investment from the company. AMD held its own talks with Hugging Face during Nvidia’s pursuit, and Salesforce had early discussions, before Nvidia announced its deal on September 3.
