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Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Salesforce, Qualcomm and others have infused $235 million into Hugging Face, an open-source AI model repository similar to GitHub for programming.

The latest Series D fundraising round brings Hugging Face’s valuation to $4.5 billion, reports CNBC.

Investors in this round have invested significantly into various generative AI models of their own.

The funds will be used “to grow the team currently at 170 and invest in more open source AI and platform building,” said Clement Delangue, Hugging Face CEO.

The New York-based company is named after the hugging face emoji -- a smiley face framed by two open hands.

“AI builders are using Hugging Face all day, every day. Maybe in five years, you’re going to have like 100 million AI builders. And if all of them use Hugging Face all day, every day, we’ll obviously be in a good position,” said Delangue.

Hugging Face hosts 500,000 different AI models, 250,000 data sets, and has 10,000 paying customers, according to the report.

The key investment in Hugging Face comes a t a time when AL models like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama 2, Google’s Bard and others are making the rounds. 

Amazon AWS and Hugging Face have partnered to make AWS Cloud Hugging Face’s preferred cloud provider.