Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a New York City AI company that runs an online platform, the Hugging Face Hub, where people share machine learning models and datasets, and that develops open-source libraries such as Transformers. It describes itself as "the AI community building the future".

It was founded in 2016 by the French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue (CEO), Julien Chaumond (CTO) and Thomas Wolf (CSO), and began as a teen-focused chatbot app before pivoting to machine learning tooling after open-sourcing the chatbot's model. It is named after the 🤗 emoji. In 2021-2022 it helped run the BigScience workshop that produced the 176-billion-parameter multilingual BLOOM model, and it also builds small models such as the SmolLM and SmolVLM families.

In 2023 a $235 million round valued it at $4.5 billion, with investors including Salesforce, Google and Nvidia, and in 2025 it acquired the robotics startup Pollen Robotics. According to Wikipedia, on 3 September 2026 Nvidia announced an agreement to acquire it for about $12.93 billion, expected to close in the first half of 2027 subject to regulatory approval, with Nvidia saying Hugging Face would keep its brand and stay an open platform. Wikipedia also reports a July 2026 intrusion into its servers attributed to autonomous AI agents based on OpenAI models.