# AI Infrastructure Valuations and Quick Commerce Market Shifts

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-08-25

## Transcript

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Hugging Face is reportedly in talks to be acquired for $13 billion.
I'm Imran Shaikh and your Tuesday Daily Crunch featuring three big tech headlines starts right now.
The country needs to find a compromise between privacy and safety, according to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley.
When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they're prioritizing the wrong thing.
And what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise, Langley said during a recent interview with Fox News.
Continuing, how do we have our safety and how do we balance privacy?
Now, Langley's Fox News appearance was just the latest interview he's given as the company faces, well, a growing public outcry around concerns that Flock surveillance cameras, drones, and license plate recognition technology could be misused.
Oh, no, no, no.
These concerns aren't just hypothetical either.
You see, the Washington Post recently identified...
46 cases where police officers have been accused of using flock tech for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their wives, girlfriends.
orexes.
Just as the data center backlash has become a potent issue on both the left and right, both Democratic and Republican politicians have begun to take aim at Flock.
On the left, Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, recently accused his opponent, Mike Rogers, of supporting, quote, this mass proliferation of Flock cameras any and everywhere, watching your every move to collect information without you even noticing.
And Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders posted, quote, Stop AI mass surveillance.
Stop FLOC.
Unquote.
Oh, and also in all caps.
On the right, we've got three House Republicans who recently introduced a bill that would prohibit the federal government from purchasing automated surveillance systems that use facial recognition, biometric IDs, or license plate recognition, including a FLOC safety camera.
Flock has already made some changes in response to the criticism, reducing the default data retention time from 30 days to 7 days and requiring that a case code be entered before accessing data.
But, you know, both of these changes can be overridden.
For example, police can save data for a longer time period by using a setting called Evidence Mode.
Indian startups spent years getting consumers accustomed to having groceries and everyday goods delivered within minutes.
Well, now Walmart-owned Flipkart is rapidly closing the gap with those quick commerce pioneers as global rival Amazon mounts its own push into instant delivery.
You see, Flipkart Minutes, which debuted in August 2024 as the e-commerce giant's foray into quick commerce, is now delivering 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, up from about 390,000 to 400,000 in just November.
People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Now that puts the two-year-old service close to Swiggy's Instamart, which is delivering about 1.4 million orders a day, according to a person familiar with its operations.
Now the gap is notable, as Flipkart is a relative latecomer to a market whose top ranks have been dominated by Instamart, Blinket, and Zepto.
Food delivery giant Swiggy launched Instamart in 2020, and Zepto arrived the following year, both during the pandemic, while Blinkit traces its roots to online grocery platform Grofers, founded in 2013.
The three have since established themselves as India's top quick commerce players.
Blinkit continues to dominate the market with around 3.4 million to 3.6 million daily orders, followed by Zepto at about 2.4 million to 2.6 million.
per recent estimates from market research firm Datum Intelligence.
Flipkart is now rapidly narrowing the gap with Instamart, the smallest of the three established leaders, by order volume.
Hugging Face has been approached to sell at a valuation of $13 billion or more, Business Insider reported over the weekend.
Now, the startup's platform and open source community is where developers and researchers share, find, test, and deploy AI models.
Hugging Face was recently the target of an attack from one of OpenAI systems, which broke out of its sandbox during a cybersecurity evaluation and breached the startup's servers.
It's not clear who Hugging Face has been in talks with, and no deal has yet been reached, according to Business Insider.
However, the startup has reportedly been talking to banks to help evaluate bids.
The talks come amid increased interest in companies providing core AI infrastructure services, as evidenced by Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of Open Router.
Now, Hugging Face last raised in 2023 at a $4.5 billion post-money valuation in a round led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Alphabet, GV, IBM Ventures, and others.
On a recent episode of the TechCrunch Equity Podcast, which you should be listening to, Hugging Face CEO Clem DeLong said that the company was close to profitability and only recently started to touch the money that it raised three years ago, adding that the startup is thinking about how to optimize for long-term sustainability of the company rather than short-term profits or fundraising maximization.
The way DeLong has discussed the company's responsibility to the hugging face community raises questions over whether the startup is truly considering selling or is simply fielding offers for what has become a central pillar in AI infrastructure.
The company earlier this year turned down a $500 million investment from NVIDIA that would have valued it at $7 billion, saying at the time that it didn't want a single dominant investor to sway decisions.
TechCrunch has reached out to HuggingFace for more info.