Kevin Durant may have just scored one of the biggest financial wins of his investment career without stepping onto a basketball court.
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform often described as a GitHub-style hub for sharing artificial intelligence models and datasets, in a deal valued at $12.9 billion, according to The Information.
The reported acquisition would represent a major move by Nvidia as the chip giant continues building its position across the AI ecosystem. Hugging Face has become a major destination for developers working with open-source AI, giving Nvidia another piece of infrastructure in an increasingly competitive landscape that includes OpenAI and Anthropic.
For Durant, the story gets especially interesting.
Through Thirty Five Ventures, the NBA superstar reportedly invested $250,000 in Hugging Face during its early days. If the reported acquisition valuation translates into the expected return for that early investment, Durant could potentially walk away with more than $60 million.
That would represent an extraordinary 24,000 percent return.
The number is particularly wild when viewed through the lens of Durant’s basketball career. A quarter-million-dollar early bet on an emerging AI company could generate a windfall that dwarfs his reported earnings from playing this season.
It also illustrates why Durant’s investment portfolio has become an increasingly important part of his business identity. Thirty Five Ventures has spent years moving beyond traditional athlete endorsements and into technology, media and venture investing, giving Durant exposure to companies with the potential to grow exponentially.
Hugging Face reportedly generates around $150 million in annual revenue, making the $12.9 billion valuation a reflection of the strategic value Nvidia sees in the platform and the broader open-source AI ecosystem.
Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face has publicly confirmed the reported acquisition.
If the deal closes at the reported valuation, Durant’s early $250,000 wager could become a textbook example of what happens when an athlete gets into a transformative technology company before everyone else sees the opportunity.