Hugging Face acquires XetHub to replace Git LFS with optimized large-file storage backend

AI Impact Summary

Hugging Face has acquired XetHub, a company that built Git-scale infrastructure for large ML datasets and models. XetHub's chunked storage and deduplication technology will replace Hugging Face Hub's current Git LFS backend, enabling incremental uploads for massive files (e.g., updating a single row in a 10GB Parquet file requires only chunk re-upload, not full file re-upload). This directly addresses Hub's current infrastructure limits: 1.3M model repos, 450K datasets totaling 12PB in LFS, with 1B daily requests. The integration will unlock efficiency gains critical as the field moves toward trillion-parameter models and enterprise-scale collaboration.