Hugging Face explored a sale at $13B+, keeping the AI M&A wave rolling. Trump scolded towns that reject data centers while Abbott said the industry dug its own grave, Fable 5 spending plateaued, and Apple cut 200+ jobs.
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Sources: Hugging Face is exploring a sale that could value it at $13B+, up from $4.5B in 2023, and has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders' interest (Business Insider)
Delangue has said Hugging Face is close to profitability and barely touched its 2023 round, and it turned down a $500M Nvidia investment at a $7B valuation earlier this year (TechCrunch)
President Trump says communities that oppose data centers are "making a mistake" as they create "tremendous amounts of jobs and money", amid bipartisan backlash (Axios)
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave" and deserve the backlash, after ordering an audit that has stalled roughly 1,800 projects (Fortune)
Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5 (Financial Times)
Nvidia plans to use its $6B licensing deal with Poolside to build one of the world's most powerful open-weight models, to compete with DeepSeek and Kimi K3 (The Wall Street Journal)
Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI (Bloomberg)
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