From a Whiteboard to NVIDIA

Infrastructure entrepreneur Carlos Teixeira reflects on co-founding XetHub, a company acquired by Hugging Face in 2024, through four moments spanning its origins, skepticism, recognition, and strategic opportunity. XetHub was built around content-defined Merkle trees, which divide files according to their contents, deduplicate chunks, and make incremental changes more efficient for large datasets. Despite claims that cloud storage services such as S3 had already solved the problem and comparisons to more visible developer tools, the company persisted as infrastructure whose value was often invisible to end users. Hugging Face quickly acquired XetHub as a replacement for Git LFS, recognizing its role in efficiently distributing AI data and models. Teixeira argues that large cloud providers’ organizational divisions between storage, content delivery, and compute create opportunities for smaller companies to offer integrated alternatives, citing adoption by Arcee and SkyPilot. He concludes that infrastructure startups require conviction and patience, noting that XetHub ultimately managed 200 petabytes before its acquisition and that he later left Hugging Face to found SageOx.

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