Three Million Models and Counting

At the close of 2025, the Hugging Face Hub had just crossed two million public models, a milestone that arrived in August 2025, barely eleven months after the first million. The prediction then was that three million would fall quickly in 2026. It did: on August 3, 2026 the Hub's counter read 2,963,204 models; by August 14 it showed 3,011,630. Hugging Face made it official on August 18. As of this writing, the counter stands at 3,012,377 public models. 3M+ 🚀

The curve

The shape of the curve hasn't changed, steady pace. In 2025, ~1.18 million models were added, more than every previous year combined; by late August of that year, 2025's additions had already surpassed all of 2024. And 2026, with ~747,000 models in its first 7.7 months, is on pace for another million-plus.

Cumulative anchors: 108,473 (Dec 2022) → 450,208 (Dec 2023) → 1,000,000 (Sep 2024) → 1.8M+ (Jul 2025) → 2,126,833 (Oct 2025) → 2,264,880 (Dec 2025) → 2,963,204 (Aug 3, 2026) → 3,012,377 (Aug 22, 2026).

The pace of each million

Note: the third million did not arrive faster than the second. It arrived at roughly the same pace a mega 2,700–3,000 new models every day, read it again slowly... ~3K models every day!!! Growth stayed exponential. There is no slowdown, no wall.

What changed since the original story

A year ago, the open-weights world still had holdouts. Now it doesn't, and the map of who builds, and who downloads, was redrawn.

• OpenAI goes open-weights (Aug 2025). BOOM! gpt-oss landed as OpenAI's first open-weight language models since GPT-2, the symbolic end of the closed-frontier era. Every major lab now ships weights to the Hub.
• The trillion-parameter era (Jul 2025 → Jul 2026). Kimi K2 became the first trillion-parameter open-weight model; a year later, Kimi K3 reached 2.8T, the largest open-weight model tracked. Meanwhile, the mean downloaded model went from 827M parameters in 2023 to 20.8B in 2025 (the median barely moved: 326M → 406M, small models remain the workhorses).
• DeepSeek's cadence (Dec 2025 → Aug 2026). V3.2 arrived in December 2025, the 1.6T-parameter V4 preview followed in April 2026, and V4-Pro went generally available in August. And DeepSeek V4 Flash? End of July GA and 21st August Vision added as an experiment! A release paced, the closed labs can't match.
• GLM-5 (now 5.2 and soon 5.3) and Qwen3.8 (Feb–Aug 2026). Z.ai's GLM-5 became the first open model to score above 50 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Alibaba's Qwen3.8-27B hit #1 trending on the Hub at launch, the Qwen family now counts 113,000+ derivative models (200,000+ tagging Qwen), more than Google and Meta combined.
• China overtakes the US in downloads (past 12 months). 41% of all Hub downloads in the past year came from China, which has now surpassed the United States in both monthly and overall downloads, a first in the Hub's history.
• The independents rise (2022 → 2025). Independent, unaffiliated developers now drive 39% of all downloads up from 17% before 2022, while industry's share fell from roughly 70% to about 37%.
• Robotics becomes the #1 dataset category (2024 → 2025). Robotics datasets exploded from 1,145 in 2024 to 26,991 in 2025 now the single largest dataset category on the Hub. The models are leaving the browser.

The ecosystem around the models

How I know

1. The underlying data is fully public and reproducible: the Hub API exposes every model's createdAt timestamp, so the cumulative curve can be rebuilt by anyone (huggingface_hub's list_models() paginates the whole Hub; ~500MB of metadata for millions of models).
2. Historical counts were verified against archived huggingface.co counters in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (e.g. 108,473 on Dec 30, 2022; 450,208 on Dec 30, 2023; 2,963,204 on Aug 3, 2026).
3. Milestones were cross-checked against official Hugging Face announcements - CEO Clem Delangue's 1M post (Sep 25, 2024) and the @huggingface 3M announcement (Aug 18, 2026) plus HF staff blogs, including the Spring 2026 "State of Open Source" report.
4. Independent triangulation comes from arXiv 2508.06811, which measured ~1.86M models on Aug 9, 2025.
5. Estimates are flagged "(est.)" throughout. The 3M crossing is bracketed, not pinpointed: the counter read 2,963,204 on Aug 3, 2026 and 3,011,630 by Aug 14, 2026.

The first million took years. The second took eleven months. The third took about the same, and the fourth is already underway. Three million models, and counting! 🚀

Sources

• Hugging Face's two million models and counting - the original story (AI World)
• State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026 - Hugging Face official blog
• A deep dive into Hugging Face model statistics - HF staff blog (lbourdois)
• arXiv 2508.06811 - Anatomy of a Machine Learning Ecosystem
• huggingface.co/models - the live model counter
• What is the Hugging Face Community Building? - HF blog
• Archived snapshots of huggingface.co/models - Internet Archive Wayback Machine