There’s an Easter Egg in the $12.9303 Billion Price Tag of the Nvidia-Hugging Face Deal

Look carefully at the Nvidia-Hugging Face deal number.

Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, parenthetically added his announcement of the company’s acquisition: “(special congratulations if you find the references to Hugging Face and Nvidia hidden in our $12,930,300,000 acquisition price).”

Techies rushed to decode the Easter egg.

The Hugging face referral was easy. The number 129,303 is the decimal representation of Unicode code point U+1F917 – the 🤗 emoji, officially called ‘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 commentators saw 93 in the combination, thinking it was a reference to The founding year of Nvidia: 1993.

Some went even further and broke it down into three sets of numbers. 12, 93 and 03. The 12, they said, referred to Nvidia’s IPO price of $12. Nvidia went public in 1999 at a price of $12 per share. The stock has skyrocketed and is now trading well above $200.

As for the 03, commentators pointed to Nvidia’s three founders: Jensen HuangChris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

Despite all the number crunching and decoding, it looks like those commenters were wrong. Hugging face CEO Clement Delangue responded to one commenter with a link to the official registry of color names.

The color code 129303, it turns out, is that vibrant shade of green that looks a lot like Nvidia’s classic color.

“Oh my god,” the commenter replied. “It was so simple and my girlfriend was right (again).”

Business Insider’s Katie Roof first reported that Hugging Face was interested in an acquisition with a valuation of at least $13 billion in August. When she posted about the Easter egg on

“Shows that the price was never really the most important thing for either party,” Delangue wrote.