Microsoft and Hugging Face expand collaboration

Today at the Microsoft Build conference, Satya Nadella announced an expanded collaboration with Hugging Face, to make its wide diversity of open models easy to deploy on Azure secure infrastructure.

If you head over to Azure AI Foundry today, you will find a vastly expanded collection of 10,000+ Hugging Face models you can deploy in a couple clicks to power AI applications working with text, audio and images. And we’re just getting started!

2 years ago, Microsoft and Hugging Face started a collaboration to make open models more easily accessible on Azure - back then the Hub was home to 200,000 open models.

First, let’s select the model in the Hugging Face Collection in Azure AI Foundry, and click the “Deploy button”. The form allows you to select a VM, instance count and deployment parameters, and start the deployment process with just another click!

With now close to 2 million open models on Hugging Face, covering a wide diversity of tasks, modalities, domains and languages, it was time to take our collaboration to the next level. The new collaboration announced today creates a framework for mutual success to vastly expand how Azure customers can benefit from Hugging Face.

"Open source is how AI moves faster—with transparency, choice, and community at its core. This collaboration represents our commitment to that momentum. By combining Hugging Face’s vibrant model ecosystem with Azure’s secure, enterprise-grade infrastructure, we’re giving developers the freedom to pick the best model for the job—and helping organizations innovate safely and at scale.”

Making more open models easily accessible to Azure customers, for secure deployment alongside company private data, will enable enterprises to build AI applications and agents while being fully in control of their technology and data.