| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Artificial intelligence Machine learning Software development |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Headquarters | |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
|
| Products | Models, datasets, spaces, learn, inference, libraries |
| Revenue | |
Number of employees | 250[1] (2025) |
| Website | huggingface |
Hugging Face, Inc., is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. Its transformers library built for natural language processing applications and its platform allow users to share machine learning models and datasets and showcase their work.
History
The company was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf in New York City, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. The company was named after the U+1F917 🤗 HUGGING FACE emoji.[2] After open sourcing the model behind the chatbot, the company pivoted to focus on being a platform for machine learning.
On April 28, 2021, the company launched the BigScience Research Workshop in collaboration with several other research groups to release an open large language model.[3] In 2022, the workshop concluded with the announcement of BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters.[4][5]

In February 2023, the company announced partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would allow Hugging Face's products to be available to AWS customers to use them as the building blocks for their custom applications. The company also said the next generation of BLOOM will be run on Trainium, a proprietary machine learning chip created by AWS.[6][7][8]

In June 2024, the company announced, along with Meta and Scaleway, their launch of a new AI accelerator program for European startups. The initiative aimed to help startups integrate open foundation models into their products, accelerating the EU AI ecosystem. The program, based at STATION F in Paris, ran from September 2024 to February 2025. Selected startups received mentoring, and access to AI models and tools and Scaleway’s computing power.[9]
On September 23, 2024, to further the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, Hugging Face teamed up with Meta and UNESCO to launch a new online language translator.[10] It was built on Meta's No Language Left Behind open-source AI model, enabling free text translation across 200 languages, including many low-resource languages.[11]
On April 2025, Hugging Face announced that they acquired a humanoid robotics startup, Pollen Robotics, based in France and founded by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet in 2016.[12][13] In an X tweet, Delangue shared his vision to "make Artificial Intelligence robotics Open Source".[14]
Cyberattacks
In early 2026, hackers hijacked the Hugging Face platform to launch Android-targeted attacks involving "powerful malware" which could completely take over a compromised target.[15]
See also
References
- ^ Palazzolo, Stephanie (February 5, 2025). "Hugging Face Lays Off 4% of Staff". The Information.
- ^ Dillet, Romain (9 March 2017). "Hugging Face wants to become your artificial BFF". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2022-09-25. Retrieved 2023-09-17.
- ^ Wiggers, Kyle (10 January 2022). "Inside BigScience, the quest to build a powerful open language model". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 1 July 2022. Retrieved 5 August 2022.
- ^ "BLOOM". bigscience.huggingface.co (Blog). Archived from the original on 2022-11-14. Retrieved 2022-08-20.
- ^ Heikkllä, Melissa (12 July 2022). "Inside a radical new project to democratize AI". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 2022-12-04. Retrieved 2023-08-25.
- ^ Bass, Dina (2023-02-21). "Amazon's Cloud Unit Partners With Startup Hugging Face as AI Deals Heat Up". Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on 2023-05-22. Retrieved 2023-02-22.
- ^ Nellis, Stephen (2023-02-21). "Amazon Web Services pairs with Hugging Face to target AI developers". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2023-05-30. Retrieved 2023-02-22.
- ^ Amazon Web Services (2023-02-21). "AWS and Hugging Face collaborate to make generative AI more accessible and cost efficient". AWS Machine Learning Blog (Blog). Amazon. Archived from the original on 2023-08-25. Retrieved 2023-08-25.
- ^ Zacks Equity Research (2024-06-25). "META Collaboration Launches AI Accelerator for European Startups". Yahoo Finance. Archived from the original on 2024-07-11. Retrieved 2024-07-11.
- ^ "NLLB: UNESCO Language Translator". Spaces. Hugging Face. 2024-09-23. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link) - ^ "UNESCO Language Translator powered by Meta and Hugging Face Launching Event". UNESCO. Archived from the original on 8 February 2026. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
- ^ Wiggers, Kyle (2025-04-14). "Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startup". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 15 April 2025. Retrieved 2025-04-15.
- ^ Koetsier, John (14 April 2025). "Open Source Humanoid Robots That You Can 3D Print Yourself: Hugging Face Buys Pollen Robotics". Forbes. Archived from the original on 15 April 2025. Retrieved 2025-04-15.
- ^ Knight, Will (14 April 2025). "An Open Source Pioneer Wants to Unleash Open Source AI Robots". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on 14 April 2025. Retrieved 2025-04-15.
- ^ Fadilpašić, Sead (30 January 2026). "Hugging Face platform hijacked to send out Android malware - here's what we know so far". TechRadar Pro. Archived from the original on 30 January 2026. Retrieved 8 February 2026.
