Google and Hugging Face Announce AI Partnership

Google and Hugging Face today announced a strategic partnership in which developers can access the latter’s AI services on the Google Cloud infrastructure.

“At Hugging Face, our goal is to build an open platform, making it easy for data scientists, machine learning engineers and developers to access the latest models from the community, and use them within the platform of their choice,” a post by Hugging Face’s Jeff Boudier and Philipp Schmid explains. “We will collaborate with Google across open science, open source, cloud, and hardware to enable companies to build their own AI with the latest open models from Hugging Face and the latest cloud and hardware features from Google Cloud.”

“Google Cloud and Hugging Face share a vision for making generative AI more accessible and impactful for developers,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian added. “This partnership ensures that developers on Hugging Face will have access to Google Cloud’s purpose-built AI platform, Vertex AI, along with our secure infrastructure, which can accelerate the next generation of AI services and applications.”

The partnership will help developers train and serve large AI models more quickly and cost-effectively on Google Cloud by providing a way to train, tune, and serve Hugging Face models with Vertex AI while supporting Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployments, providing Cloud TPU v5e to more open source developers, supporting future A3 VMs that will be powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, and integrating with Google Cloud Marketplace and its simplified management and billing systems.

Vertex AI and GKE will be made available as deployment options on the Hugging Face platform in the first half of 2024, the companies say.