Clem Delangue says he approached Jensen Huang himself.

On CNBC's Squawk Box alongside Huang on September 3, the Hugging Face CEO said the company initiated the deal over the summer: "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 matched it: "I am honored that Clem came to me as he considered the next chapter of Hugging Face." A seller-initiated framing reads as an admission that a neutral open-weights hub couldn't fund itself against frontier-lab economics. CNBC