Names, versions and owners change fast. Checked October 2026.
In plain words
Hugging Face is a company, and its website, called the Hub, is where much of the open AI world meets. Researchers and companies upload their trained models and the data they used. Anyone can browse, download and use them, often for free.
When a company releases a model with open weights, such as Llama, Mistral or DeepSeek, the files usually appear on Hugging Face. The Hub also hosts datasets for training, and Spaces: small demo apps that let you try a model in your browser.
The company was founded in New York in 2016 and is named after the hugging-face emoji. It also makes free software, especially a library called Transformers, that makes it easy to run these models. The box above shows who owns it now.
Everyday example
A public library where readers can also donate books
Imagine a huge public library where anyone can borrow a book, and anyone can also donate one they wrote, with a card describing it. Some books are recipes, some are maps, some are puzzles you can try right at the desk. Hugging Face is that library for AI: the books are models and datasets, the cards are model cards, and the puzzle desks are Spaces.
Where the example breaks: Library books are checked by librarians. On Hugging Face, uploads come from many people with little checking, so quality and safety vary and it is up to users to read the card and choose carefully.
Latestas of October 2026
- Ownership
- Nvidia agreed to buy it on 3 September 2026; closing expected in the first half of 2027, subject to approval
- Size
- Its documentation says it hosts over 2 million models, 1.5 million datasets and 1.5 million Spaces
These details change often. The rest of this page explains what it is, which stays true.
How it actually works
Under the hood, the Hub works much like a code-sharing site.
Each model is a repository
Every model, dataset or Space is a Git repository: a version-controlled folder of files. For a model, that means the weight files holding its parameters, plus settings and code.
Model cards explain what it is
Each repository has a card describing what the model does, how it was trained, its licence and its known limits. Good cards help users spot bias and misuse risks.
Libraries load models in a few lines
The Transformers library downloads a model from the Hub and runs it, for text, images or audio. Other popular tools for running models on your own computer also fetch from the Hub.
Spaces for trying things
Spaces are small hosted web apps where people demo a model, so others can try it without installing anything. Many start from a foundation model someone else shared and fine-tune it.
- Founded
- 2016 in New York, by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf
- What it hosts
- Models, datasets and Spaces demo apps, most of them free to download
- Best-known software
- Transformers, an open-source library for running and training models
- Name
- From the hugging-face emoji
Questions people ask
Is it safe to download models from Hugging Face?
Usually, but uploads come from many people with little checking. Prefer models from known organisations, read the model card and licence, and be careful with files that run code. In January 2026 attackers were reported to have misused the platform to spread Android malware.
Does Hugging Face make its own AI models?
Mostly it hosts other people's models. Its main contributions are the Hub itself and free software, such as the Transformers library, that many people use to download, run and train models.
Is Nvidia buying Hugging Face?
Nvidia announced an agreement to buy Hugging Face on 3 September 2026, subject to regulatory approval. Nvidia said Hugging Face would remain an open platform and would not require Nvidia hardware. The box above shows whether the deal has closed.
Why is it called Hugging Face?
It is named after the hugging-face emoji. The company began in 2016 as a chatbot app for teenagers before turning into a platform for sharing machine learning models.