Hugging Face vs Scale AI: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
A full-year revenue figure is unavailable here for Hugging Face. Scale AI had $870M (unaudited) of annual revenue in FY2024.
Latest financial snapshot
Hugging Face
- Latest annual revenue
- Unavailable here
- Net income
- Unavailable here
- Net margin
- —
- Revenue growth
- —
Scale AI
- Latest annual revenue
- $870M (unaudited) (FY2024)
- Net income
- Unavailable here
- Net margin
- —
- Revenue growth
- —
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.
Scale AI
Scale is private and does not publish audited results. Bloomberg reported about $870 million of revenue in 2024 and a target near $2 billion for 2025 before the Meta deal. After OpenAI and Google pulled back, that target looked out of reach, but CEO Jason Droege wrote in early 2026 that 2025 was Scale's biggest revenue year, with more than $1 billion in new business and nearly half of bookings in Q4. The company valued itself at more than $29 billion in the June 2025 Meta transaction, up from $13.8 billion in its May 2024 Series F. Net income has not been disclosed, though Scale says the data business is now profitable. Scale AI is an absolute powerhouse in the artificial intelligence infrastructure sector, providing massive data labeling and RLHF services with a private market valuation of approximately $13.8 billion.
Revenue and profit by year
Hugging Face
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 run-rate | $150M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2025 run-rate | $81M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2024 run-rate | $53M | — | — | — | Source |
Scale AI
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024 (unaudited) | $870M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2023 | $335M | — | — | — | Source |
| FY2022 (unaudited) | $290M | — | — | — | 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.
Scale AI
- Data business
Not disclosed
Training data, RL environments, robotics data and evaluations for AI labs and large technology companies; profitable since the second half of 2025, per the company.
- Applications: enterprise
Not disclosed
Generative AI applications for companies such as Mayo Clinic, BP and Allianz.
- Applications: public sector
Not disclosed
AI programs for the U.S. Department of War and international governments including Qatar, the UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
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.
Scale AI
How it makes money
Scale AI earns money in two ways. Its data business charges AI labs and large technology companies for training data, reinforcement learning environments and model evaluations, produced by software pipelines plus a paid contributor network run through Outlier and Remotasks; the company says it has paid contributors more than $1 billion over ten years.
Growth strategy
Scale's 2026 plan, as described by its leadership, is to move technical capabilities from the data business into applications faster, invest in a unified AI-native platform for enterprise and government customers, and expand abroad. It opened or grew offices in New York, London, Washington, D.C., Doha, St.
Competitive advantage
Scale's advantages are scale, track record and government access. It has applied what it calls 15 billion human decisions to train leading models across 150 languages and locales, it runs SEAL benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam and SWE-Bench Pro that labs cite at launch, and it holds U.S.
Questions about Hugging Face vs Scale AI
Which company has higher revenue — Hugging Face, Inc. or Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. had $870.0M (unaudited) (FY2024). A comparable annual revenue figure for Hugging Face, Inc. was unavailable here.
How does revenue per employee compare for Hugging Face, Inc. and Scale AI, Inc.?
Scale AI, Inc. generates $725k / 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 Scale AI, Inc. make money?
Hugging Face, Inc. and Scale AI, Inc. 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. Scale AI, Inc.: Scale AI earns money in two ways.
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 Scale AI overview