Hugging Face vs OpenAI: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
Hugging Face reported $150M of revenue in FY2026 and — of net income. OpenAI reported $20B of revenue in FY2025 and — of net income.
Latest financial snapshot
Hugging Face
- Latest revenue
- $150M (FY2026)
- Net income
- —
- Net margin
- 0.0%
- Revenue growth
- —
OpenAI
- Latest revenue
- $20B (FY2025)
- Net income
- —
- Net margin
- 0.0%
- Revenue growth
- +216.2% a year, FY2023–FY2025
Financial summary
Hugging Face
Hugging Face does not publish financial statements. Outside estimates and reporting put its annualized revenue at about $150 million in mid-2026 (The Information), and Delangue told TechCrunch in July 2026 that the company was close to profitability. It raised roughly $400 million in total, the largest round being a $235 million Series D in August 2023 at a $4.5 billion valuation from Salesforce Ventures, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, and Sound Ventures. According to the Financial Times, it turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation in late 2025. In September 2026 Nvidia agreed to pay $12.93 billion for the whole company: about $11.9 billion to stockholders plus up to about $1.0 billion in equity retention awards for employees, roughly 86 times annualized revenue.
OpenAI
OpenAI reports revenue as annualized run rate rather than audited GAAP figures. The company says it reached $1 billion of revenue within a year of launching ChatGPT, was generating about $1 billion per quarter by the end of 2024, and passed $20 billion of annualized revenue by the end of 2025. Axios reported the run rate was nearing $70 billion at the end of September 2026. Funding has scaled alongside: $110 billion announced in February 2026 at a $730 billion pre-money valuation grew to $122 billion committed at $852 billion post-money by March 31, 2026, anchored by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. An employee tender of about $7 billion followed in August 2026 at the same valuation. The company remains unprofitable because compute spending outpaces revenue.
Revenue and profit by year
Hugging Face
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $150M | — | 0.0% | — | Source |
OpenAI
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | $20B | — | 0.0% | +400.0% | Source |
| FY2024 | $4B | — | 0.0% | +100.0% | Source |
| FY2023 | $2B | — | 0.0% | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
Hugging Face
- Enterprise Hub Subscriptions~50%
Tiered enterprise seats and corporate licenses providing private model repositories, SOC2 compliance, audit logs, and SSO.
- Serverless Inference Endpoints~30%
Pay-as-you-go GPU compute billing for deploying scalable production machine learning APIs on dedicated cloud hardware.
- Spaces Hardware Rentals & Pro Accounts~20%
Hourly compute fees for upgrading interactive Gradio Spaces to dedicated Nvidia A100/H100 GPUs and developer Pro subscriptions.
OpenAI
- ChatGPT SubscriptionsMajor
Consumer, team, business, education, and enterprise subscriptions.
- API UsageMajor
Usage-based developer and enterprise model access through OpenAI APIs.
- Enterprise PlatformGrowing
Business deployments, governance, custom workflows, and platform services.
- Partnerships and LicensingEmerging
Strategic licensing, infrastructure partnerships, commerce, and outcome-based AI workflows.
Business model and strategy
Hugging Face
How it makes money
Hugging Face gives away its core platform and libraries and charges for the things companies need once they put open models into production. Public model and dataset hosting is free.
Growth strategy
Hugging Face grows by being the first place open models land and then selling the tools to use them. Recent moves include buying Argilla (data curation) and XetHub (large-file storage) in 2024, buying humanoid robot maker Pollen Robotics in April 2025 and launching the low-cost Reachy Mini robot in July 2025, publishing its own small open models (SmolLM, SmolVLM), and routing Hub users to third-party inference provid…
Competitive advantage
Hugging Face's advantage is a network effect that is hard to copy. Major open-weight models from Meta, Mistral, Alibaba's Qwen team, DeepSeek, Google, and Nvidia are published on the Hub, so developers go there first, which in turn makes it the first place new models are released.
OpenAI
How it makes money
OpenAI earns revenue in three main ways. First, ChatGPT subscriptions: consumer tiers such as Plus and Pro, plus Business, Enterprise and Edu seats sold to organizations. Second, the API platform, where developers and companies pay per token to build OpenAI models (GPT, reasoning, image, audio and embeddings) into their own software.
Growth strategy
OpenAI is growing on four fronts: selling ChatGPT and Codex into enterprises, turning ChatGPT into a broader 'super app' with agents, shopping and apps inside the chat, building its own compute through the Stargate data center program and chip partnerships, and moving into hardware through the 2025 acquisition of Jony Ive's io.
Competitive advantage
OpenAI's advantage is distribution plus scale. ChatGPT is the most widely used AI assistant, with OpenAI citing more than 900 million weekly users in February 2026, which gives it a direct consumer channel that rivals have to buy or build.
Questions about Hugging Face vs OpenAI
Which company has higher revenue — Hugging Face, Inc. or OpenAI?
Hugging Face, Inc. reported $150.0M (FY2026), while OpenAI reported $20.0B (FY2025). By last reported revenue, OpenAI is the larger business, with Hugging Face, Inc. reporting a smaller revenue base. Note: these are from different fiscal years and are not a direct like-for-like comparison.
Which is more financially efficient — Hugging Face, Inc. or OpenAI?
OpenAI generates $4.44M / employee in revenue per employee. A comparable figure for Hugging Face, Inc. requires matching employee and revenue data from the same reporting period.
How do Hugging Face, Inc. and OpenAI make money?
Hugging Face, Inc. and OpenAI generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. Hugging Face, Inc.: Hugging Face gives away its core platform and libraries and charges for the things companies need once they put open models into production. OpenAI: OpenAI earns revenue in three main ways.
Is Hugging Face, Inc. bigger than OpenAI?
By last reported revenue, OpenAI ($20.0B (FY2025)) is the larger company compared to Hugging Face, Inc. ($150.0M (FY2026)). Revenue scale is one dimension of size — market capitalisation, employee count, and geographic reach are also relevant depending on the context.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the Hugging Face vs OpenAI overview