Hugging Face
Central platform for open AI models and datasets, with demo hosting, an inference API and its own libraries for developers.
What it does
Hugging Face is a hub where companies, researchers and the community publish AI models, datasets and small web apps (Spaces). You download models to run or adapt them locally, or call them through Inference Providers: an OpenAI-compatible interface that routes requests to partners such as Groq, Together or Scaleway. For your own models you rent dedicated Inference Endpoints, and for Spaces you can add GPU hardware when needed. Private repositories, access tokens and malware scanning are part of the hub.
Who it suits
Developers and teams who want to test, compare, fine-tune or self-host open models – for instance as an alternative to closed services or for a RAG prototype.
Data protection for businesses
Without a Team or Enterprise plan, repositories are always stored in the US; from Team upwards you can choose the EU as storage region, including for Spaces and endpoints. Hugging Face offers a GDPR data processing agreement with the Enterprise plan. The vendor does not use private repositories for training; when routing through Inference Providers it does not store requests or responses, but the partners apply their own policies. Hugging Face is SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
How we use it
With open-source models, our selection usually starts on Hugging Face: before we build something of our own, we check whether a pretrained model already fits the task.
Limits
Model quality and licences vary widely, so you have to check them yourself. GPU compute and storage cost extra based on usage. Without programming skills you won’t get far.