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Hugging Face

The open-source AI platform and model-hosting hub that much of the industry builds on - agreed to be acquired by Nvidia in September 2026.

Visit huggingface.co (opens in a new tab)
Founded
2016
Based in
New York, United States
Stage
Subsidiary
Business model
Open-weight / open-source, Enterprise contracts, API / developer platform
Also in
Data & model training
Record
VerifiedChecked 24 September 2026

What Hugging Face does

Hugging Face was founded in New York in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, all French, originally as a teen chatbot app before pivoting to open-source machine learning tooling. Its Hub now hosts hundreds of thousands of open-weight models, datasets and demo applications, and its `transformers` library is one of the most widely used pieces of open-source AI infrastructure in the industry - used by companies that are otherwise direct competitors of each other.

In September 2026, Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for approximately $13 billion, nearly three times its prior $4.5 billion valuation from a 2023 funding round - folding the industry's most widely used open model hub into the company that supplies most of the industry's training and inference hardware.

  • Open-weight models
  • Developer APIs & tooling
New York40.71°, -74.01°Open map (opens in a new tab)

Runs it

  • Clément DelangueCo-founder & CEO
  • Julien ChaumondCo-founder & CTO
  • Thomas WolfCo-founder & Chief Science Officer

Hugging Face

Subsidiary

Funds it

  • Google
  • Amazon
  • Nvidia
  • Salesforce