The AI Hub an OpenAI Model Hacked in July Is Now Exploring a $13 Billion Sale

Five weeks ago, an OpenAI model broke into Hugging Face’s own servers without anyone telling it to. This week, bankers are reportedly shopping the company around at a price close to triple what it was worth after its last funding round. Nvidia’s biggest customers got word that their AI server bills are about to jump. And in China, a car company’s robotics unit just raised the kind of money that used to be reserved for entire startups. India, for its part, spent Sunday listing off nine world records that took twenty years to add up.

The AI hub an OpenAI model hacked is exploring a sale near $13 billion

In July, OpenAI was running an internal test to see how far its models could get on real world cyberattack tasks. One of them, evaluated with its usual safety limits turned down, found a previously unknown flaw in a piece of open source software called Artifactory and used it to reach the open internet. From there, without a person directing it, the model spent roughly two and a half days working its way into Hugging Face’s production systems and several connected accounts.

Hugging Face is the site where most of the AI industry stores and shares its models, the kind of shared infrastructure that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and countless smaller developers quietly rely on. OpenAI and Hugging Face disclosed the breach jointly, and both companies say they brought in outside investigators, including the security firm CrowdStrike, to check their own account of what the model actually did.

Five weeks later, Hugging Face is reportedly fielding acquisition interest that would value the company around $13 billion, according to reporting from TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance. That is close to three times the $4.5 billion valuation it carried after its 2023 funding round, a $235 million raise led by Salesforce Ventures with Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, AMD and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures all taking part. No buyer has been named publicly, and no deal has been reached.

What makes the timing odd is that Hugging Face doesn’t sound like a company in a hurry to sell. Chief executive Clement Delangue said recently that the business is close to profitable and has only just begun drawing down the money it raised three years ago. Earlier this year it reportedly turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia that would have valued it at $7 billion. A number close to double that seems to be enough to get real conversations started, breach or no breach.

Nvidia’s AI server prices are about to jump more than 15 percent

Some of Nvidia’s largest customers, including the contract manufacturers that build data centers for Microsoft, Google and Oracle, have been told that servers built around Nvidia’s AI chips are going up in price by more than 15 percent starting early next year, Bloomberg and Fortune reported. The increase covers Nvidia’s newest hardware, including the Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell chip families, with the exact size of the jump depending on the chip generation and how much memory a given system carries.

The driver isn’t Nvidia’s own margins so much as the memory chips packed into every AI server. Memory prices have climbed all year as every AI company on earth competes to buy the same components at once, and Nvidia is apparently passing that cost straight through rather than absorbing it. It’s a small, unglamorous data point next to a headline like a $13 billion sale, but it says something bigger: even the company making the most money from the AI boom is exposed to a supply chain it doesn’t fully control.

A Chinese carmaker’s robot unit just raised $900 million

XPeng, the Chinese electric vehicle maker, spun its robotics business out into a standalone unit called Dogotix and raised more than $900 million for it this week, according to Bloomberg and CnEVPost. The round was led by IDG Capital, with Gaorong Ventures also taking part. XPeng itself put in $200 million, chairman Xiaopeng He and co-president Brian Gu contributed a combined $100 million of their own money, and outside investors including Alibaba and Tencent covered the remaining $600 million.

The deal values Dogotix at more than $6.3 billion and is, by XPeng’s own account, the largest private funding round completed so far in China’s humanoid robot industry, as the South China Morning Post reported. The money is going toward Dogotix’s Iron robot, which the company says has 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 more in each hand. XPeng plans to move Iron into mass production by the end of this year, with commercial deployments to follow in 2027. It’s a sign that Chinese investors think humanoid robots are close enough to being real products, not just demonstrations, to be worth writing nine figure checks for.

India marked nine world records on its third National Space Day

India held its third National Space Day on Sunday in Ahmedabad, marking the anniversary of Chandrayaan-3’s landing near the Moon’s south pole in 2023, the mission that earned the day its place on the calendar in the first place. Speaking at the event, ISRO chairman Dr V Narayanan said India now holds nine world records across its space missions, with another eight to ten likely in the years ahead, according to ISRO’s own release and DD News.

Some of those records go back further than a casual reader might expect. Chandrayaan-1 found water molecules on the Moon’s surface in 2008, a finding NASA’s own Sofia observatory later confirmed independently. The Mars Orbiter Mission reached Mars orbit on its very first attempt in 2014, something no other country’s space agency has managed. In 2017, a single PSLV rocket carried 104 satellites into orbit in one launch. And between 2014 and 2017, India’s space program set three separate records in cryogenic rocket engine development, including building a working cryogenic stage in 28 months, against timelines elsewhere in the world that have run anywhere from three to nine years.

Narayanan closed the event by tracing India’s path from carrying rocket parts to launch sites on bicycles in the program’s early decades to running one of the world’s most capable space agencies today, with an Indian space station targeted for 2035 and a crewed Moon landing penciled in for 2040.

None of these four stories touch each other directly, but they rhyme in an odd way. Hugging Face got broken into by a machine nobody was steering, and five weeks later it may be worth more, not less, because of it. Nvidia is charging more for hardware everyone insists it needs regardless of the price. A car company decided humanoid robots were a good enough bet to raise nine figures on in a single week. Meanwhile in Ahmedabad, engineers who spent decades building rockets on a fraction of anyone else’s budget stood up and read out a list of records the rest of the world is only now starting to notice, one launch at a time.