Nvidia teams up with Hugging Face to offer cloud-based AI training
Nvidia is partnering with AI startup Hugging Face to expand access to AI compute.
Timed to coincide with the annual SIGGRAPH conference this week, Nvidia announced that it’ll support a new Hugging Face service, called Training Cluster as a Service, to simplify the creation of new and custom generative AI models for the enterprise.
Set to roll out in the coming months, Training Cluster as a Service will be powered by DGX Cloud, Nvidia’s all-inclusive AI “supercomputer” in the cloud. DGX Cloud includes access to a cloud instance with eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of GPU memory, as well as Nvidia’s AI Enterprise software to develop AI apps and large language models, and consultations with Nvidia experts.
Companies can subscribe to DGX Cloud on their own — pricing starts at $36,999 per instance for a month. But Training Cluster as a Service integrates DGX Cloud infrastructure with Hugging Face’s platform of more than 250,000 models and over 50,000 datasets — a helpful startup point for any AI project.
“People around the world are making new connections and discoveries with generative AI tools, and we’re still only in the early days of this technology shift,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said. “Our collaboration will bring Nvidia’s most advanced AI supercomputing to Hugging Face to enable companies to take their AI destiny into their own hands with open source to help the open source community easily access the software and speed they need to contribute to what’s coming next.”
Hugging Face’s tie-up with Nvidia comes as the startup reportedly looks to raise fresh funds at a $4 billion valuation. Founded in 2014 by Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face has expanded rapidly over the past nearly decade, evolving from a consumer app to a repository for all things related to AI models. Delangue claims that more than 15,000 organizations are using the platform today.
The collaboration makes sense for Nvidia, which in recent years has made bigger pushes into cloud services for training, experimenting with and running AI models as the demand for such services grows. Just in March, the company launched AI Foundations, a collection of components that developers can use to build custom generative AI models for particular use cases.
Tech market research firm Tractica forecasts that AI will account for as much as 50% of total public cloud services revenue by 2025. Demand is so high for AI cloud training infrastructure, in fact, that it’s causing hardware shortages, forcing cloud providers like Microsoft to curb investors’ expectations around growth.
