Ai2 and Hugging Face Expand Partnership, Unlocking 2 Petabytes for Open AI
Ai2 triples its Hugging Face storage to ~2 petabytes and drops rate limits, cementing its position as the Hub's most prolific open-science publisher
- Storage tripled: Hugging Face is expanding Ai2's Hub storage to ~2 petabytes and removing standard rate limits on downloads.
- Scale of presence: Ai2 has 968+ models and 1,275+ datasets on the Hub, with 50M+ downloads since spring 2024 -- more annual artifacts than any other tracked org.
- MolmoAct 2 integration: Ai2's open robotics model is now native to LeRobot, downloaded 400K+ times in weeks, with a 37x inference speedup over v1.
- 720 hours of robot data: MolmoAct 2 ships with the largest open-source bimanual manipulation dataset ever published, while competitors keep data closed.
- Benchmarks go official: olmOCR-Bench is now an official Hub leaderboard; RewardBench 2, IFBench, and AstaBench also live on the Hub.
- What's next: Ai2 previews forthcoming multimodal models, tool-using agents, and science-domain models -- all backed by a $152M NSF/NVIDIA compute project.
The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and Hugging Face have announced a major expansion of their partnership, one that goes well beyond a simple storage upgrade. The deal reflects a deeper alignment between the two organizations: Ai2 is the most prolific publisher of open AI artifacts on the Hub, and Hugging Face is betting its infrastructure on that momentum continuing.
What actually changed
The terms are concrete and effective immediately. Hugging Face is roughly tripling Ai2's storage on the Hub to nearly two petabytes. Ai2's traffic will also no longer be subject to the Hub's standard rate limits, allowing even its largest datasets and multi-checkpoint models to download at full throughput. For context, rate limiting on the Hub has historically been a real friction point for anyone trying to pull down large model checkpoints or multi-hundred-gigabyte datasets -- especially for teams outside major cloud providers.
Since spring 2024, Ai2's models and datasets have been downloaded more than 50 million times from the Hugging Face Hub. That number explains why the infrastructure upgrade was necessary: Ai2 wasn't just growing, it was outgrowing the default tier.
The most prolific publisher on the Hub
Ai2 is expanding its partnership with Hugging Face to give its growing portfolio of fully open models, datasets, benchmarks, and applications the storage, bandwidth, and integrations needed to reach more researchers and developers. According to Hugging Face's own model release heatmap, Ai2 publishes more new artifacts annually than any other organization it tracks. That's a striking claim -- one that puts Ai2 ahead of commercial labs that have far larger headcounts and compute budgets.