Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in revenue, agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and published research showing that the scaffolding around a model matters more than the model. ChatGPT can now log into websites on your behalf. Apple put its first 2nm chip in the Mac mini a week before Tim Cook hands over. Waymo is bringing robotaxis to Munich. And the Fitbit founders came back with a wearable that has no screen.

Nvidia: A record quarter, a $12.9B shopping trip and a research drop

Three Nvidia stories this week, and they only really make sense together. Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in Q2 revenue on Wednesday, up 106% year over year, with data center alone at $89 billion and Q3 guidance between $105.8 and $110.1 billion.

Then the spending. The Information reported on Wednesday night that Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Business Insider says nothing is signed yet and it could still fall apart, and neither company has commented, which is odd for Nvidia. They normally correct reports they dislike within hours.

The logic is simple enough. OpenAI, Google, Amazon and Anthropic are all building their own chips now, so a thriving open-source ecosystem keeps the rest of the market on Nvidia hardware. It also walks Nvidia back into cloud after it scaled down DGX Cloud last year. Hugging Face does around $150 million in revenue, so that is roughly 86x. Expensive, sure. But they just banked $96 billion in a quarter.

And then the research. On Friday Nvidia showed that a custom harness with proper memory handling and a supervisor agent sitting above the working agent took Claude Opus 5 from 30% to 100% on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark of 2D games with no instructions where the model has to work out the rules itself. Same model, different scaffolding around it. Databricks found something similar in July, where the wrong harness doubled inference cost on an identical model. So if your agent build underperforms, look at your scaffolding before you swap models. That is the part you actually control.

Hugging Face also launched Microduck with Pollen Robotics this week, a $399 armless robot that waddles, picks up small objects with an articulated beak and ships with a camera, mic, speaker and a small Lidar. It is aimed at developers who want to teach it tricks through reinforcement learning. Clem Delangue says it was designed "made to move, ready to fall" and reckons 50,000 units would be a success. Shipping a duck in the week you reportedly agree to a $12.9 billion sale is a decent flex.

OpenAI: ChatGPT now logs into websites for you

OpenAI put this out on Tuesday and the announcement pulled 4.1 million views, which tells you people understood the implications immediately. ChatGPT Work can now use its computer and browser to sign in to websites on web and mobile, without ChatGPT ever seeing your username or password. It surfaces the login screen, you enter your credentials or use a password manager, and it keeps working while you walk away. Payments and bookings still pause for confirmation.

The same release also added webhook-triggered scheduled tasks, so a new Gmail message, a Slack channel post or a GitHub pull request can kick off a task on its own. So that is cron, plus a logged-in browser, plus a model. Invoices into the accounting tool and action items into a vendor portal are exactly the ops work that eats junior hours at an agency, and now it runs unattended.

But do you want an agent holding a live session inside a client's system? Read the permissions properly before you roll this out to a team, because the blast radius here is a lot bigger than a wrong answer in a chat window.

Apple: A new Mac mini and a new CEO

Apple announced a new Mac mini on Tuesday with the M6, its first 2nm chip, plus an M5 Pro option above it. Apple claims up to 4x faster AI performance than the M4 model, a dual 16-core Neural Engine and 170GB/s memory bandwidth. It starts at $899, up from $799, and ships on 22 September.

Demand for the M4 minis had already spiked because people were running local agents on them, and Apple clearly noticed. A quiet box under the desk that runs models locally is a real answer to per-token cloud pricing, especially for agencies sitting on client data they would rather not ship to somebody's API.

It also lands exactly a week before Tim Cook hands over to John Ternus on 1 September. Ternus ran hardware engineering for years, so a local-AI machine in his handover week says a fair bit about where he will push. The keynote is in two weeks, block it in your calendar.

Waymo: Munich gets the first EU robotaxis

Waymo is coming to Europe. The company announced on Tuesday that phased testing starts in Munich within the next few weeks, with a public launch planned for the end of 2027. That makes Munich Waymo's third market outside the US and the first inside the EU.

The early fleet is small and all-electric, Jaguar I-Pace. The first stretch goes into building high-definition street maps, training local autonomous specialists and adapting the software to how people actually drive there. Anyone who has sat on the Mittlerer Ring at 5pm knows that is a genuinely hard problem.

For the DACH region this is the moment autonomous driving stops being an American news story. And it starts a clock. Whatever regulatory template Munich ends up with is the one Vienna will be arguing about a year later, so if your clients touch mobility, logistics or insurance, that conversation is now on your calendar whether you booked it or not.

XPeng: $900M for a robot nobody has bought yet

XPeng's robotics unit raised over $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion, led by IDG Capital with Tencent and Alibaba joining. XPeng calls it the largest single private round in Chinese physical AI so far. Around $600 million came from outside investors, the rest from an XPeng subsidiary and company leadership.

The product is IRON, a humanoid with 76 degrees of freedom in the body and 21 in each hand, running on chips, controllers and motion modules XPeng built in-house. Mass production is targeted for the end of this year, first into XPeng's own stores and campuses, then commercial deliveries in China and abroad in 2027.

Worth remembering they have not sold a single one yet. But EV makers already own the batteries, motors, sensors, vision stack and factory discipline that humanoids need, so the head start is real. And in the same week, US robotics startup Generalist raised another $200 million barely two months after a $400 million round. That is over $1.1 billion into robot intelligence in one week, none of it waiting for a shipped product.

Luffu: The Fitbit founders are back

James Park and Eric Friedman, the pair who built Fitbit, launched Luffu Link on Tuesday. A $250 screenless LTE band with all-day health sensing, voice logging, location awareness and a way to reach trusted contacts when something goes wrong. Five days of battery, LTE included, no separate carrier plan. Preorders are open, shipping early 2027.

The missing screen is the whole idea. The band pairs with the Luffu app they shipped earlier this year, which uses AI to organise family health information and flag changes worth looking at. So the band is a sensor and a lifeline, and the intelligence sits somewhere else entirely.

After a decade of watches trying to become small phones, a wearable that deliberately does less is the more interesting bet. So if you build health products, work out how much of your interface your users would actually miss.

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