Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face — the “GitHub of AI” — for $12.9 billion. If it holds, the company controlling 90% of AI chips would own the open ecosystem’s neutral commons. A brilliant move, a concentration risk, and the loss of a rare European-founded champion. Reported, not yet confirmed.
Nvidia just answered the question hanging over AI: the boom isn’t slowing, it’s accelerating, with five US giants set to spend $1.3 trillion next year. Boom or bubble, the scale is staggering — and Europe, able to regulate AI but not to build it, is barely at the table.
The Wall Street Journal reported on July 26 that Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees so OpenAI can lease a 10-gigawatt data center in southern Ohio — a project that could exceed $500 billion once chips are included, with Nvidia separately discussing up to $350 billion to finance those chip purchases. The chip maker is underwriting its own customer’s demand for its own product, on a former uranium site, powered by electricity the US government allocates and Japan funds. gafam.ai reads the circular financing at the heart of the AI boom, the bubble question it raises, and Europe’s total absence from every layer.
On June 30, Chinese food-delivery giant Meituan open-sourced LongCat-2.0 — a 1.6-trillion-parameter model released under a permissive MIT license, which the company says is the first model of its scale trained and run entirely on domestic Chinese chips, with no Nvidia GPUs. The benchmark claims are self-reported and the full weights aren’t yet public. But the hardware milestone is the story — and it lands as Washington gates access to American models. gafam.ai reads what it means for Europe’s impossible AI choice.
AWS AI chief Peter DeSantis confirmed to Bloomberg that Amazon is exploring selling its custom Trainium AI chips to third-party data centres for the first time — a direct challenge to Nvidia’s dominance. Amazon’s custom silicon business already runs at a $20 billion annual rate, growing at triple-digit pace, with Trainium 3 largely sold out. Anthropic has committed to up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, OpenAI to around 2. If Amazon sells chips externally, the AI hardware landscape shifts. gafam.ai examines what it means — and why Europe has no equivalent.