Hugging Face Collaborates with Microsoft to launch Hugging Face Model Catalog on Azure

Today, we are thrilled to announce that Hugging Face expands its collaboration with Microsoft to bring open-source models from the Hugging Face Hub to Azure Machine Learning. Together we built a new Hugging Face Hub Model Catalog available directly within Azure Machine Learning Studio, filled with thousands of the most popular Transformers models from the Hugging Face Hub. With this new integration, you can now deploy Hugging Face models in just a few clicks on managed endpoints, running onto secure and scalable Azure infrastructure.

This new experience expands upon the strategic partnership we announced last year when we launched Azure Machine Learning Endpoints as a new managed app in Azure Marketplace, to simplify the experience of deploying large language models on Azure. Although our previous marketplace solution was a promising initial step, it had some limitations we could only overcome through a native integration within Azure Machine Learning. To address these challenges and enhance customers experience, we collaborated with Microsoft to offer a fully integrated experience for Hugging Face users within Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Hosting over 200,000 open-source models, and serving over 1 million model downloads a day, Hugging Face is the go-to destination for all of Machine Learning. But deploying Transformers to production remains a challenge today.

“With the new Hugging Face Hub model catalog, natively integrated within Azure Machine Learning, we are opening a new page in our partnership with Microsoft, offering a super easy way for enterprise customers to deploy Hugging Face models for real-time inference, all within their secure Azure environment.” said Julien Simon, Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face.

Deploying Hugging Face models on Azure Machine Learning has never been easier:

Within minutes, you can test your endpoint and add its inference API to your application. It’s never been easier!