Good morning. Did you hear the one about the AI startup co-founder?
He left one job and got four more.
Today’s tech news follows. Have a wonderful weekend. —Andrew Nusca
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Nvidia may acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
Nvidia is reportedly buying AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
Hugging Face is a repository that hosts open-source AI models, as well as benchmark evaluations, and data sets used for AI training and testing.
A deal would give Nvidia a major foothold in open-source AI at a moment when open-source developers are increasingly closing the gap with closed systems from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
The deal would also help Nvidia protect its dominant position in AI chips, which has been somewhat under threat as major tech peers build out their own chips to reduce their reliance on Nvidia hardware.
That’s because those who download open-source models from Hugging Face need to host and run those models on their own computing infrastructure, which usually involves Nvidia’s GPUs. Hugging Face also uses Nvidia chips to run the paid hosting services it offers developers.
An acquisition would also mark a return for Nvidia to cloud computing, a business it reportedly scaled back roughly a year ago. Owning Hugging Face could also give the tech company a way to offload unused cloud capacity from the computing deals it has guaranteed for customers.
Hugging Face last raised money in 2023, when a $235 million round led by Salesforce Ventures valued it at $4.5 billion. It turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia last year that would have valued it at $7 billion, reportedly because it did not want a single dominant investor. —Beatrice Nolan
SpaceX says it’s building its largest spaceport yet
Rather apparent in SpaceX’s IPO filings is the ever-constant named goal of reaching Mars to build compute infrastructure and even human settlements on the red planet.
In Elon Musk’s first earnings call, he reiterated those goals, the very ones that led him to create the company over two decades ago.
Now he’s expanding his lofty space travel aspirations with a new real-estate and infrastructure investment.
SpaceX is committing $100 billion to build a massive new spaceport in coastal Louisiana, giving the rocket company another multibillion-dollar expansion project as it races to scale Starship, satellite manufacturing and AI infrastructure.
The facility, called Starbase Louisiana, will occupy roughly 125,000 acres on Pecan Island in Vermilion Parish and is expected to become the fourth and largest of SpaceX’s launch complexes.
Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027, with the first launch targeted for as early as 2029. At full buildout, the site is expected to contain five launch facilities—each with two launch pads—along with propellant farms, a propellant-production facility, power generation, vehicle-processing facilities and housing for employees and their families.
“Starbase Louisiana will ultimately have over a dozen launch towers, enabling more than 30 Starship flights per day and making it the biggest launch site on Earth,” Musk posted on X. “SpaceX makes sci-fi real.” —Joshua Hong
Google DeepMind is losing its grip on elite AI talent
Lately the AI talent market has looked more like a pro sports draft than a conventional hiring cycle. Cash-rich labs are offering athlete-like salaries plus equity packages that can turn early employees into billionaires.
The result? Elite researchers are swapping between rival labs at dizzying speed.
Google DeepMind, once the leading destination for many of those researchers, is now finding itself on the losing side of that contest, according to new data exclusively shared with Fortune. Analysis from Zeki Data shows that where OpenAI and Anthropic are making gains in the AI talent market, Google DeepMind (and to some extent Meta) are stumbling.
Interviews with several current and former staff suggest DeepMind’s changing identity has weakened part of its historic appeal. As Google has pushed to close the gap with OpenAI and Anthropic, the lab has become more tightly organized around improving and commercializing Gemini—a shift that some researchers see as displacing the open-ended, long-horizon science that once made DeepMind such a desirable destination for academics.
Three current and two former DeepMind staffers told Fortune the recent string of departures comes down to a mix of factors: rival labs like Meta and Microsoft aggressively poaching talent with cash-heavy offers, mounting frustration inside Google over where it stands in the AI race, sinking morale, and the pull of pre-IPO stock at competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Globally, DeepMind is still bringing in more research and advanced-engineering staff than it is losing. But its arrivals-to-departures ratio—a measure of hires relative to exits—has fallen sharply, according to Zeki.
The leading destination for departing DeepMind staff? Anthropic. —Beatrice Nolan
More tech
—More Trump tech tariffs? They’re coming to chips and consumer devices, per Politico.
—Meta calls for TikTok and YouTube to mirror the child safety changes it’s making as part of its recent $17 billion settlement. (No apologies, tho.)
—Big Tech companies say there’s a limited window to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks.
—...and investors say there’s money to be made in the resulting uptick in cybersecurity spending.
—Nvidia is reportedly considering starting an employee-funded political action committee.
—More details about OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face: 1,200 coordinating AI agents, 70,000 message board communications, a thousand points of light.
—India’s TCS will acquire Porsche's IT consulting business, MHP, for €320 million.
—Shein’s Hong Kong IPO: Priced at about $6.20, per a new report, raising $1.73 billion and valuing the fast fashion retailer at about $26.5 billion.