It turns out that the amounts of some multi-billion acquisitions can also be determined by some in-jokes.
When NVIDIA announced it was acquiring Hugging Face, the headline number everyone repeated was a clean “$12.9 billion.” But the actual figure in Jensen Huang’s blog post was oddly specific: $12,930,300,000. Most people scrolled past it. They shouldn’t have.
Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf nudged people to look closer, posting on X that there were hidden references baked into the price tag itself, and inviting the internet to go find them. It didn’t take long.
The first six digits of that number — 129303 — are the decimal conversion of Unicode code point U+1F917. That code point belongs to 🤗, officially named “Hugging Face” in the Unicode standard, and it’s the exact emoji the company named itself after back in 2016. NVIDIA didn’t just buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — it priced the deal at the company’s own emoji.
There’s reportedly a second layer to the joke, aimed at NVIDIA itself. Read as a hex colour code, #129303 renders as a shade of green that’s close to NVIDIA’s own brand colour. Others online have pointed to a different reading of the same six digits — split as 12, 93, and 03, which could nod to NVIDIA’s $12 IPO price in 1999, its founding year of 1993, and its three cofounders. Either way, the number seems built to flatter both companies at once.
For a $12.9 billion acquisition, one of the largest in NVIDIA’s history, burying a two-way emoji joke inside the actual purchase price is a fairly delightful bit of nerd humour.
Big Tech Has Done This Before
NVIDIA and Hugging Face aren’t the first to slip a wink into a headline number. Google, in particular, has a long history of it.
The most famous example dates back to Google’s own 2004 IPO filing, where the company said it intended to raise $2,718,281,828. Read that as $2.718281828 billion, and it’s the mathematical constant e (Euler’s number) to nine decimal places — a fitting easter egg from a company whose name is itself a play on “googol.” Google liked the trick enough to repeat it more than a decade later. In 2016, as we reported at the time, Google said it was buying back $7,019,340,976.83 worth of its Class C stock — a number that turns out to be e raised to the power of 26, the number of letters in the alphabet, a nod to its parent company Alphabet.
Then there was the time Google’s own homepage briefly belonged to someone else. In 2015, an ex-Google employee named Sanmay Ved noticed on Google Domains that google.com was showing up as available to buy. He added it to his cart on a whim, expecting an error — instead, the purchase went through, and for about a minute, Ved owned Google’s own domain and reportedly started receiving internal webmaster notifications before Google caught the glitch and reversed the sale. Google later thanked him with a reward of $6,006.13, which, read as digits, spells out “GOOGLE” ($G,OOG.LE).
Coincidence clearly isn’t a word that applies to how some of these companies pick their numbers.