Today on the Microsoft Construct 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.
When you head over to Azure AI Foundry today, you’ll discover a vastly expanded collection of 10,000+ Hugging Face models you’ll be able to deploy in a pair clicks to power AI applications working with text, audio and pictures. And we’re just getting began!
It’s time to construct – an expanded collaboration
2 years ago, Microsoft and Hugging Face began a collaboration to make open models more easily accessible on Azure – back then the Hub was home to 200,000 open models.
With now near 2 million open models on Hugging Face, covering a large diversity of tasks, modalities, domains and languages, it was time to take our collaboration to the following level. The brand new collaboration announced today creates a framework for mutual success to vastly expand how Azure customers can profit from Hugging Face.
“Open source is how AI moves faster—with transparency, alternative, 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 liberty to select the very best model for the job—and helping organizations innovate safely and at scale.”
— Asha Sharma, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft
Making more open models easily accessible to Azure customers, for secure deployment alongside company private data, will enable enterprises to construct AI applications and agents while being fully accountable for their technology and data.
We’re enabling corporations to take control of their AI destiny, deploying the very best open models securely inside their Azure account, to construct AI applications they will trust and confirm.
— Clement Delangue, CEO and cofounder at Hugging Face
Easy methods to use Hugging Face in Azure AI Foundry
Let’s head over to Azure AI Foundry, and choose the Model Catalog. Here you’ll be able to now find over 10,000 models under the Hugging Face Collection.
Models within the Collection include the preferred, trending models on Hugging Face for a big selection of tasks to work with text, audio and pictures – including text generation, feature extraction, fill-mask, translation, identifying sentence similarity, image classification, image segmentation, text to image generation, image to text conversion, automatic speech recognition and audio-classification.
To make the Hugging Face Collection on Azure AI Foundry enterprise-ready, we’re only featuring models:
- having successfully passed Hugging Face security tests to screen for any vulnerability, including with ProtectAI Guardian and JFrog security scanner
- with model weights stored in safetensors format, avoiding potential Pickle vulnerabilities
- without distant code, to avoid any arbitrary code insertion at runtime.
As well as, Microsoft and Hugging Face will repeatedly test inference containers for vulnerabilities to take care of and patch them as needed.
Now let’s say you would like to deploy for example the favored Microsoft Phi-4 Reasoning Plus open model.
First, let’s select the model within the Hugging Face Collection in Azure AI Foundry, and click on the “Deploy button”. The shape permits you to select a VM, instance count and deployment parameters, and begin the deployment process with just one other click!
Now, in case you prefer browsing models on the Hub, you can even start from the model page – the “Deploy on Azure ML” option will take you to the identical deployment option inside Azure AI Machine Learning Studio.
More Hugging Face to are available in Azure AI Foundry
We’re really enthusiastic about all the brand new Hugging Face models and modalities now directly available inside Azure AI Foundry, but we’re not going to stop there!
Within the weeks and months to come back, you’ll be able to expect a rolling thunder of updates:
- Day-0 releases – Hugging Face will collaborate with Microsoft to make latest models from top model providers available in Azure AI Foundry the identical day they land on Hugging Face
- Trending models updates – Hugging Face will repeatedly monitor trending models to enable them on Azure AI Foundry each day
- Latest modalities – Hugging Face and Microsoft will work together to enable more modalities and domain-specific tasks, including video, 3D, time series, protein and more.
- Agents and tools – Small, efficient, specialized open models make them ideal to construct powerful but secure AI agents and applications
When you’re on Azure, it’s time to construct with open models!
