Who's who · Open-source projects

Hugging Face

The main public hub for sharing open AI models, datasets and demo apps

At a glance

Founded
2016
Based in
New York, United States
People
Clément Delangue, Co-founder and chief executive; Julien Chaumond, Co-founder and chief technology officer; Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and chief science officer
Known for
Hugging Face Hub, Transformers, llama.cpp and ggml
Licence
Apache 2.0 (main libraries, such as Transformers)
Funding
Private; NVIDIA agreed to buy it (Sep 2026), closing expected H1 2027
Developers
18M+ (Sep 2026)
Pending acquirer
NVIDIA: $11.9B plus up to $1B in retention awards
Website
https://huggingface.co

Hugging Face runs the Hugging Face Hub, a public platform for sharing open AI models, datasets and demo apps. It hosts about three million models, a million applications and half a million datasets, used by more than 18 million developers. The company also maintains widely used open-source libraries, led by Transformers.

Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf founded it in New York in 2016. It began as a chatbot app for teenagers before turning to open-source machine learning tools. In February 2026 ggml.ai, the team behind llama.cpp, joined Hugging Face; the projects stay open source and their maintainers keep technical control.

On 2 September 2026 NVIDIA signed a definitive agreement to buy Hugging Face for about $11.9 billion, plus a retention programme for staff worth up to about $1 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. NVIDIA has said the Hub will stay open to other models, clouds and chipmakers, and that its hardware will not be required to build on or deploy through the platform. Until the deal closes, Hugging Face remains an independent company.

Sources

  1. NVIDIA / US SEC, NVIDIA Corporation Form 8-K: agreement to acquire Hugging Face, 2026-09-02
  2. Hugging Face, GGML and llama.cpp join HF to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI, 2026-02-20
  3. TechCrunch, Nvidia confirms it will buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, 2026-09-03
  4. Contrary Research, Hugging Face: business breakdown and founding story, 2026-01-15

Facts last checked 2026-10-02