China's ModelScope and MoArk race to replace Hugging Face at home

Rest of World reported on September 29 that two Chinese sites are competing to become the country's Hugging Face. Alibaba's ModelScope, launched in 2022, said in March that it had 170,000 models and 250 million users. OSChina's MoArk, launched in 2023, hosts more than 20,000 commonly used models, according to OSChina chief executive Xu Yong. No other outlet has confirmed those figures.

Chinese regulators blocked Hugging Face in 2023, the report says, but the government quietly tolerates labs and developers who use VPNs to reach it. Researcher Rebecca Arcesati of the Mercator Institute for China Studies told the outlet that Beijing sees access to international platforms as useful to its tech industry, while wanting the whole AI stack to be home-grown.

The article also says Nvidia announced in September that it was acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and that a regulatory filing about the deal flagged the risk that regulators could ban Chinese models from the site. The Trump administration has reportedly discussed such bans. The paper has not seen the filing itself, and Rest of World does not quote it at length.

Xu said MoArk has engineers adapting open models to run on different Chinese chips, calling it the company's mission to make mainstream open models run on them. ModelScope has run university hackathons and opened an event space in Hangzhou. Rest of World says both sites offer model testing and customisation, with free usage and paid compute.

Developers are not yet convinced. Chen Yunfei, an independent developer in Kunming, told Rest of World the main attraction is faster downloads, but that Hugging Face and GitHub remain the default because they offer greater variety. He said the domestic platforms still have to persuade developers why they should switch.