Hugging Face Hub Storage Regions

Hugging Face has launched Storage Regions as part of its Enterprise Hub plan, enabling organizations to to choose the physical location of their models and datasets. This feature addresses critical needs for digital sovereignty, legal compliance, and data transfer efficiency.

Regulatory and Legal Compliance

Storage Regions allow organizations in regulated industries to meet strict data residency requirements. For companies operating within the European Union, this enables the development of machine learning workflows in a GDPR-compliant manner by ensuring that datasets, models, and inference endpoints are stored exclusively within EU data centers.

Performance Improvements for Large Files

Storing data closer to a team's physical location and infrastructure significantly reduces latency and increases throughput for uploads and downloads. Because model weights and dataset files are typically very large, regional storage provides a substantial performance boost.

According to Hugging Face, users located in Europe who store their repositories in the EU region can expect upload and download speeds approximately 4-5x faster than if the data were stored in the US region.

Available Regions and Configuration

As of November 2023, Hugging Face supports the following storage regions:

• US 🇺🇸
• EU 🇪🇺
• Asia-Pacific 🌏 (Coming soon)

Organization Settings

Enterprise Hub organizations can manage their storage locations via a dedicated Regions settings page. This interface provides an audit of current repository locations and dropdown menus to select the default region for new repositories.

Repository Visibility

To ensure transparency within an organization, any model or dataset repository stored in a non-default location is marked with a Region tag. This allows organization members to identify the physical location of a repository at a glance.