There's an Easter egg hiding inside the $12.9303 billion price tag of the Nvidia-Hugging Face deal
There's an Easter egg hiding inside the $12.9303 billion price tag of the Nvidia-Hugging Face deal
By
Henry Chandonnet
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Matt RAMEY / AFP via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Look closely at the Nvidia-Hugging Face deal number.
Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf snuck a parenthetical into his announcement of the company's acquisition: "(special congrats if you find the Hugging Face and Nvidia references hidden in our $12,930,300,000 acquisition price)."
Techies raced to decode the Easter egg.
The Hugging Face reference was easy. The number 129,303 is the decimal representation of Unicode code point U+1F917 — the 🤗 emoji, officially named "Hugging Face."
One commenter pointed out this emoji connection. Wolf responded: "And there is a second meaning related to Nvidia."
The Nvidia reference was trickier. Some commenters spotted 93 in the combination, guessing that it was a reference to Nvidia's founding year: 1993.
Some went further, breaking it out into three sets of numbers. 12, 93, and 03. The 12, they said, referenced Nvidia's $12 IPO price. Nvidia went public in 1999 at a price of $12 per share. The stock has skyrocketed, and now trades well over $200.
As for the 03, commenters pointed to Nvidia's three founders: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem.
This should be the solution no?
129303 = 🤗 emoji unicode
— MemeCoinEnjoyer 🟪 (@Leon_W_C) September 3, 2026
12 / 93 / 03 = NVIDIA’s $12 IPO / 1993 founding / 3 founders
129303 is basically Hugging Face's hidden easter egg number
For all the number-splitting and decoding, it seems like those commenters got it wrong. Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue responded to one commenter with a link to the Official Register of Color Names.
The color code 129303, it turns out, is that vibrant shade of green that looks a whole lot like Nvidia's classic color.
"Oh my god," the commenter responded. "It was so simple and my gf was right (again)."
Business Insider's Katie Roof first reported that Hugging Face was fielding acquisition interest at a valuation of at least $13 billion in August. When she posted about the Easter egg on X, wondering whether it meant money was left on the table to land on the $12.93 billion final price, Delangue commented that he was "surprised people didn't notice earlier."
"Shows that price was never really the most important thing for both sides," Delangue wrote.
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Henry Chandonnet
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Henry Chandonnet is a senior reporter on the Business News desk. He writes about tech culture, from Silicon Valley's startup class to the everyday AI user. He also closely covers Big Tech and the workplace. Henry previously wrote for Fast Company, where he covered trending tech news. He's written for The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and Vulture.Email Henry at [email protected], reach him on Signal at henrychand.30, or follow him on X @HenryChandonnet.