Multi-billion dollar AI community startup Hugging Face announced Its fourth acquisition to date on Thursday, a $10 million purchase of a small AI collaboration platform called Argilla.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue now says he's getting acquisition requests from many other startups — at least 10 a week.

“This year, especially, it's grown quite a bit,” he said Bloomberg.

^{Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images}

Hugging Face allows developers to openly share and test AI models that anyone can use, and has partnered with companies like Google AND Microsoft. company pretends to have over a million models, datasets and AI applications on its platform.

After a $235 million funding round in August, with investments from Amazon, Nvidia, Intel and other big tech names, Hugging Face is now rated to 4.5 billion dollars.

Delangue's remarks that he sees more AI startups looking to be acquired could signal that the AI ​​industry is being consolidatedor entering the phase when competitors begin to merge, according to Bloomberg.

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Big tech companies have been quietly buying up AI startups lately. According to a brief REPORT from portfolio management company Stocklytics, Apple has made the most acquisitions of AI startups of its peers, acquiring 32 startups last year and at least A more this year.

Google bought 21 AI startups and Meta bought 18, according to the same report.

Artificial intelligence stood out last year as one of the top-performing industries for unicorn growth, or billion-dollar businesses.

A February morning star REPORT found that more than four out of every 10 startups that became unicorns in 2023 focused on AI and machine learning.

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