Hugging Face

An open-source AI model and dataset hosting platform, whose robotics effort is LeRobot.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by French entrepreneurs Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, and is headquartered in New York. It is best known for the Hub, its model and dataset hosting platform, and the Transformers library — most researchers who download open-source weights or upload datasets pass through it. In robotics, it built the open-source framework LeRobot (a unified dataset format plus training and deployment code), paired with the SO-100/SO-101, an open-source robot arm whose parts cost a bit over $100; in April 2025 it acquired French humanoid robot company Pollen Robotics (maker of Reachy 2), and in June it released the small VLA SmolVLA. After a funding round in August 2023 it was valued at $4.5 billion. On September 3, 2026, NVIDIA announced it would acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9 billion, a deal expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval; NVIDIA said Hugging Face would keep its brand and continue operating as an open platform.

ExampleA newcomer teleoperates an SO-101 with LeRobot to record a few dozen demonstrations, uploads them to the Hub, and then trains ACT or SmolVLA with a single command.

Also called

抱抱脸 (colloquial Chinese nickname), Hugging Face Hub

Related

LeRobot · SmolVLA · SO-100 / SO-101 Arm · Pollen Robotics Reachy Mini · Pollen Robotics · LeRobotDataset

Sources

Hugging Face - Wikipedia
SmolVLA - Hugging Face Blog

As of

2026-09