Clem Delangue says he approached Jensen Huang himself because open-source AI 'needed more resources, more scale'

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In a CNBC 'Squawk Box' appearance alongside Huang on September 3, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said the company initiated the deal over the summer, telling Becky Quick 'we realized that Hugging Face and open-source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more resources, more scale, more visibility.' Huang's framing matched it: 'I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face.' The seller-initiated framing is the notable part, it reads as an admission that a neutral open-weights hub could not fund itself against frontier-lab economics.