Hugging Face is an open AI platform and community that describes itself as “The AI community building the future” and “the platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications.” It hosts models, datasets, and interactive applications (Spaces) and maintains widely used open-source libraries including Transformers and Diffusers.
As of June 2026, the site reports hosting over 2 million models, more than 500,000 datasets, and over 1 million applications, and states that more than 50,000 organizations use the platform, including major technology companies. It offers free hosting alongside paid team, enterprise, and GPU compute plans.
Why business readers should care: Hugging Face is the de facto distribution hub for open AI, so it is where most downloadable models and datasets are found, evaluated, and integrated, making it central infrastructure for any open-model strategy.