Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B, OpenAI’s Jalapeno chip, Instinct the $2.5B iMessage AI assistant

<p>In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down Nvidia&#39;s $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, the first real benchmarks on OpenAI&#39;s Jalapeno chip, and Instinct, the pre-revenue AI assistant that just came out of stealth at a $2.5 billion valuation.</p><p>After debriefing the &quot;hot girls of tech&quot; X discourse, they start with Nvidia&#39;s biggest acquisition ever: Hugging Face at $12.9 billion, roughly 86x its rumored $150 million in revenue. Maya explains what Hugging Face actually does it has 3 million+ open source models and is the default hub for every developer. The girls debate why Nvidia wants it including keeping the open source world locked into their chips, owning the one-click deploy layer against infra players, and getting data on what millions of developers are downloading. The pod also gets into the Microsoft-GitHub precedent for antitrust guardrails, the robotics data angle, and the best part of the story: Hugging Face turned down Nvidia&#39;s $500 million investment at a $7 billion valuation in 2025 because they didn&#39;t want one investor steering the company…the deal is never dead.</p><p>Next, the pod gets into OpenAI&#39;s Jalapeno chip, built with Broadcom, now that SemiAnalysis has released third-party benchmarks. It&#39;s an inference ASIC with a 700-watt power budget matching an H100, designed back in 2024 so it can swap into power-constrained data centers, and it reverses standard chip architecture by giving power to memory instead of compute, the opposite of a Blackwell or Rubin. Critics flagged that it costs the same as a Rubin chip, but SemiAnalysis found it&#39;s 5x cheaper with multi-token prediction. With OpenAI spending $14 billion on inference this year and custom ASICs at 28% of 2026 chip spend, the pod thinks Nvidia&#39;s 80% margins won&#39;t hold. Tune in to hear the greatest text Anika has ever received about chip design.</p><p>Finally, Instinct: the iMessage agent from a Sierra alum, referral-only (a la like Raya), pre-revenue at $2.5 billion and supposedly already raising at $5B. Maya thinks it will stay free and take a small fee on every purchase, while Anika thinks the Raya effect means people would happily pay. Instinct called a website to fix Maya&#39;s rejected contacts prescription and bought Anika&#39;s Oura charger off she’s put off for 6 months, which seems more like an Anika issue than a problem the world needs to solve. Priya is the lone holdout who&#39;d rather just do it herself. Tune in to find out if the pod would give Instinct their check at $2.5B.</p><p>This episode is brought to you by</p><ol><li>Kalshi, where the pod will be watching the odds on Broadcom&#39;s earnings next week. Sign up at <a href="http://kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheckkalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck">kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck</a> and get $10 when you trade using our code.</li></ol><p>Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.</p><p>00:00 &#39;Tech is Having a Hot Girl Renaissance&#39; article debrief04:06 Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for $12.9B09:54 Nvidia&#39;s AI stack strategy14:14 Robotics18:26 OpenAI&#39;s Jalapeno chip23:19 Jalapeno chip design30:02 $2.5B AI assistant with no revenue?!<br>34:58 Instinct&#39;s biz model and architecture</p>