Hugging Face
Hugging Face is the hub for open AI models, datasets and Spaces demo apps, run by the company of the same name. Developers and researchers use it to download open-weight models, host Gradio demos on shared ZeroGPU hardware and call hosted models through Inference Providers. NVIDIA announced a deal to acquire Hugging Face on September 3, 2026.
Quick facts
Best for
- ML engineers and researchers
- Open-source model publishers
- Developers demoing AI apps
- Teams hosting private models
Key features
Browse, download and version open-weight models and datasets in Git-based repositories with public or private visibility.
Host Gradio, Docker or static demo apps; static Spaces are free, new compute Spaces need a paid plan, and an Nvidia T4 small costs $0.40 per hour.
Gradio Spaces borrow NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs per function call, within a daily quota set by your account type.
Call models from partner providers with one Hugging Face token, billed at the provider's rates with no Hugging Face markup.
Deploy any Hub model on dedicated, autoscaling infrastructure, with CPU instances starting at $0.033 per hour.
Chat with open models in the browser, where the Omni router picks a suitable model for each request.
Log in, download and upload repositories from the terminal with the hf command and the huggingface_hub Python library.
Use cases
- Download an open-weight model and its tokenizer to fine-tune on your own data locally.
- Publish a Gradio demo of a research model on ZeroGPU so reviewers can try it in the browser.
- Test several hosted LLMs through Inference Providers before committing to a single API vendor.
- Give a company team SSO, audit logs and storage regions for private models on the Team plan.
Pricing
Current deals
What is Hugging Face?
Hugging Face runs the Hub, a shared home for open AI models, datasets and Spaces apps. Most activity is public and free; paid plans add storage, compute credits and organization controls.
Plans at a glance
- Free: public repos, static Spaces and 5 minutes of ZeroGPU per day; inference needs purchased credits.
- PRO ($9/month): 10x private storage, $2.00 of monthly inference credits, 8x ZeroGPU quota, compute Spaces and Dev Mode.
- Team ($20/user/month): SSO, storage regions, audit logs and resource groups.
- Enterprise ($50/user/month): SCIM provisioning, the highest limits and dedicated support.
Storage beyond included limits is priced per TB, from $12 to $18 per TB per month for private repositories.
Ownership news
On September 3, 2026, NVIDIA announced an agreement to acquire Hugging Face. NVIDIA says the platform will keep supporting open-source and open-weight models from across the ecosystem.
Limitations
ZeroGPU works only with the Gradio SDK and doesn’t support torch.compile, and free accounts get lower queue priority than paid ones. Free accounts have no included inference allowance, so even light API use means buying credits. Model licenses differ from repo to repo, so check each one before commercial use.
Hugging Face FAQ
Alternatives to Hugging Face
Google's browser playground for Gemini models, API keys and vibe-coded apps.
Cloud IDE with an AI agent that builds and deploys apps.
AI pair programmer and coding agent inside your editor and GitHub.
Open-source coding agent for VS Code and JetBrains that uses your own model keys.
Sources
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