Hugging Face
Open-source AI collaboration platform for models, datasets, and tooling.
Hugging Face provides the largest open platform for discovering, sharing, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models, datasets, and demos. It has become the default collaboration hub for the open-source AI ecosystem—backed by Transformers, Diffusers, PEFT, and managed inference. On 2026-09-03 NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B; until close (expected H1 2027, pending regulators) Hugging Face remains independent, and NVIDIA says the Hub will stay open to all model builders, clouds, and accelerators.
Why Hugging Face matters
If open models are the ingredients, Hugging Face is the marketplace and toolkit. Most teams discover, download, evaluate, and demo models through the Hub, and Transformers remains the lingua franca of applied NLP and multimodal ML.
Last reviewed: 5 September 2026
Best fit for
When architects typically choose Hugging Face.
- Open-source development
- Model discovery
- Fine-tuning
- Community collaboration
- Demo and evaluation workflows
Strengths
Qualitative snapshot for architects—not a public ranking.
- Model discovery★★★★★
- Open tooling★★★★★
- Community / collaboration★★★★★
- Fine-tuning workflows★★★★☆
- Frontier closed models★★☆☆☆
Quick facts
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- New York, NY, USA
- Ownership
- Private
- Open source
- Yes
- Enterprise
- Yes
- Flagship model
- Llama 4
On DataAIHub
- 4Models
- 3Products
- 4Tools
- 3GitHub
- 1Research
- 4Guides
- 4Benchmarks
Company profile
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- New York, NY, USA / Paris, France
- Founders
- Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf
- CEO
- Clément Delangue
- Funding
- Private
- Ownership
- Private
- Country
- United States
- Primary focus
- Model hub, Open-source ML libraries, Inference platforms
- Target users
- Researchers, Developers, Startups, Enterprises
- Revenue model
- Hub Pro / Enterprise, Inference Endpoints, Spaces compute
- Deployment
- Hub downloads, Inference Endpoints, and partner clouds
- Licensing
- Open libraries; model licenses vary by publisher
- Open source
- Yes
- Cloud provider
- Yes
- Website
- https://huggingface.co
- Confidence
- High
- Source coverage
- 11
Ecosystem
Competes with
- OpenAI
Hub + Inference Endpoints compete with closed model platforms for distribution and hosting.
- Databricks
Competes for enterprise model hubs, serving, and ML platform spend (Mosaic vs Hub).
Works with
- Transformers
Core library for loading and running Hub models.
- vLLM
Production serving for many Hub LLMs.
- Ollama
Local runner that pulls many models originating on the Hub.
Recommended for
- Fine-tuning
PEFT + Transformers is the default open fine-tuning path.
- Transformers
How the Transformers library structures modern ML stacks.
Often paired with
- Meta
Llama releases are primarily distributed and discussed via the Hub.
- Mistral AI
European open models are typically published on Hugging Face.
- NVIDIA
NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face on 2026-09-03 (not closed). Hub models are commonly served on NVIDIA GPUs.
How Hugging Face evolved
Key moments in chronological order.
- Acquisition
NVIDIA agrees to acquire Hugging Face
NVIDIA announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B. Hugging Face remains independent until close. NVIDIA pledged the Hub will stay open to all model builders, clouds, and accelerators. Close is expected in the first half of 2027 pending regulators.
- Research
OpenAI publishes Hugging Face eval-incident findings
OpenAI’s post-incident report covers the July ExploitGym evaluation in which research models with reduced safeguards compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. Hugging Face had disclosed and contained the activity earlier.
- Platform
Hub as open-model hub
Models, datasets, and Spaces concentrate open AI collaboration and distribution.
- Platform
Inference Endpoints
Managed production inference for Hub models without self-hosting ops.
- Platform
Spaces
Turns the Hub into a place to demo and share interactive ML apps.
- Open source
Datasets library
Standardizes how the community loads, shares, and versions training data.
- Open source
Becomes the default open toolkit for pretrained NLP models.
- Founded
Hugging Face founded
Started as a chat app company; pivoted into open ML tooling.
Products
Foundation models
Related tools
Related research
- Hugging Face blog
Evaluation
GitHub
Related benchmarks
Related rankings
Related guides
- Fine-Tuning
Fine-tune Hub models with PEFT and Transformers.
- Transformers
How the Transformers library structures modern NLP stacks.
- Large Language Models
Using open LLMs from the Hub in real applications.
- Embeddings
Open embedding models for search and RAG.
Explore more companies
- MetaUnited StatesMeta advances open multimodal research and releases the Llama open-weight model family used widely in self-hosted AI stacks. Muse Spark 1.3 (with Muse Code) is Meta’s paid Meta Model API path for agentic coding and multimodal agents. Combined with PyTorch, Llama still lets organizations train, fine-tune, and serve models without depending on a proprietary API.
- Mistral AIFranceMistral AI builds Mistral Large 3, Small/Medium commercial tiers, and open-weight models, plus La Plateforme APIs and Le Chat. Mixtral remains an Apache-2.0 self-host option; it is not listed on Mistral serverless API pricing as of 2026-08-16. Regional Endpoints (EU or US) are generally available.
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