To play devil's advocate: Hugging Face was probably not profitable, and someone has to pay the bills long-term. Nvidia benefits from Hugging Face and the operating costs are pennies to them. For them it makes sense to acquire HF just to keep it running. HF shutting down or self-destructing in the search of profits would be costlier for Nvidia than just buying it now
That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a permissive hands-off HF may be numbered
They had incredible revenue growth the last few years and just broke 100M in revenue. I don't know what their internal spend was , but that was almost half of their recent round in ARR. Mostly likely they were profitable or on a clear trajectory to revenue growth. Huggingface hosts a lot of data and models, but mostly static cold storage is pretty cheap tbh.
Their revenue mostly comes from enterprise deals which are very profitable, and they are in a hot industry with loads of enterprise customers paying them. Storage is also extremely profitable with very fat margins at a large scale like what HF is operating at.
That said, I share all your concerns. The days of a permissive hands-off HF may be numbered