VW, you may recall, is the world’s second largest automaker behind Toyota. It owns everything from Audi to Bentley to Ducati and Lamborghini and Porsche.

The pain is coming from all sides. U.S. tariffs are taking their toll, of course, but so is Chinese competition and a serious oversupply of European factories. VW said it expects to slash its available models by half.

Though if I may: Here’s hoping its electric bus, ID. Buzz, isn’t one of them. Stay weird, VW. —Andrew Nusca

P.S. Speaking of weird: The word doesn’t begin to adequately describe snorting nanoparticles, but brain-computer interface folk are a different breed.

P.P.S. We’re off on Monday for Labor Day in the U.S. Expect us back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Want to send thoughts or suggestions to Fortune Tech? Drop a line here.

It’s official: Nvidia will acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia on Thursday agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion—not the biggest sum the AI industry has seen, but quite the exit for a 10-year-old New York startup named after emoji.

“It’s been a wild ride for Hugging Face,” co-founder Thomas Wolf wrote on social media. “We certainly did not anticipate, back in 2016, as a tiny team of scrappy underdogs, that the field would grow so much or that the impact we could have on it would become so massive.”

The deal for Hugging Face, a trusted repository for AI developers, makes clear how important open-weight models (such as the ones Hugging Face hosts on its platform) are for the future of Nvidia’s business. 

As OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and other closed-source AI heavyweights that have been major customers of Nvidia develop their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs, the company sees open-weight models as a core future revenue stream.

For Hugging Face, getting bankrolled by Nvidia could mean major growth for the platform. It currently has 18 million individual users and 200,000 enterprise clients. “Our goal is to get to 100 million AI builders in the next few years,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said.

Nvidia has had its eye on Hugging Face for years and participated in the company’s 2023 funding round. Last year, Hugging Face reportedly turned down a $500 million investment offer from Nvidia because the investment would have made Nvidia the company’s largest minority shareholder and the cofounders wanted it to retain its independence.

No longer. “This summer, the planets aligned,” Delangue said. “We increasingly were convinced that Nvidia would be the perfect home for us.” —Emily Forlini

OpenAI launches its next top model: GPT-6 Astra

OpenAI’s newest and most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, is out, and one of its hallmark features is called “computer use,” in which the model aims to navigate a computer as a human would.

It’s just one of a wide range of new and advanced capabilities, OpenAI says, including mathematical proficiency, software engineering, and defensive cybersecurity. 

But “computer use is a particularly important part of what’s new,” OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman said. The model “can zip through spreadsheets, fill out forms, and navigate across web pages often at superhuman speed,” he added.

OpenAI also released benchmark assessments that showed Astra beats its previous best model, GPT-5.6 Sol, as well as the best current models from its rival Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1, on a wide range of tasks. 

OpenAI is not the first to market with an AI agent that can use a computer. Anthropic pioneered the space with a beta program in 2024, and Perplexity built a system that can navigate a virtual computer to complete tasks for users in February this year. 

But the concept is still not mainstream. To Brockman, computer use could be considered the start of the “AGI era,” as in artificial general intelligence. 

Don’t expect computer use to show up in every office overnight. OpenAI is limiting the release of Astra to a limited set of enterprise customers, including those in its cybersecurity-focused Daybreak program. Astra will become available to all Plus, Pro, and Enterprise users “in the coming days,” as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS. —EF

More tech

—Adobe names a new CEO. Anil Chakravarthy replaces Shantanu Narayen on Dec. 1.

—Oura files for a U.S. IPO. Some $1.2 billion in revenue over the last nine months but a $924 million loss, too.

—Nvidia may invest $2.5 billion in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab.

—Big Tech CEOs petition G20 to minimize AI regulations. Don’t strangle the future, argue OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

—Anthropic: Still a Pentagon supply chain risk, per Emil Michael.

—PayPal pauses venture portfolio sale. It seeks to wind down PayPal Ventures but bids reportedly came in lower than expected.

—Trump imposes tariffs of 100% on foreign-made drones in the latest escalation with China.

—Microsoft opens access to Xbox Cloud Gaming. Users without a Game Pass subscription can pay as they go.