Cloudflare Launches Workers AI, Integrates Hugging Face for Effortless, Global AI Model Deployment

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2024 — Cloudflare, Inc. today announced that developers can now deploy AI applications on Cloudflare’s global network in one simple click directly from Hugging Face, the leading open and collaborative platform for AI builders.

With Workers AI now generally available, Cloudflare is the first serverless inference partner integrated on the Hugging Face Hub for deploying models, enabling developers to quickly, easily, and affordably deploy AI globally, without managing infrastructure or paying for unused compute capacity.

Despite significant strides in AI innovation, there is still a disconnect between its potential and the value it brings businesses. Organizations and their developers need to be able to experiment and iterate quickly and affordably, without having to set up, manage, or maintain GPUs or infrastructure. Businesses are in need of a straightforward platform that unlocks speed, security, performance, observability, and compliance to bring innovative, production-ready applications to their customers faster.

“The recent generative AI boom has companies across industries investing massive amounts of time and money into AI. Some of it will work, but the real challenge of AI is that the demo is easy, but putting it into production is incredibly hard,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder, Cloudflare. “We can solve this by abstracting away the cost and complexity of building AI-powered apps. Workers AI is one of the most affordable and accessible solutions to run inference. And with Hugging Face and Cloudflare both deeply aligned in our efforts to democratize AI in a simple, affordable way, we’re giving developers the freedom and agility to choose a model and scale their AI apps from zero to global in an instant.”

Workers AI is Generally Available with GPUs Now Deployed in More Than 150 Cities globally

Today, Workers AI is generally available, providing the end-to-end infrastructure needed to scale and deploy AI models efficiently and affordably for the next era of AI applications. Cloudflare now has GPUs deployed across more than 150 cities globally, most recently launching in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, and Lagos for the first locations in Africa, as well as Amman, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Seoul, to provide low-latency inference around the world. Workers AI is also expanding to support fine-tuned model weights, enabling organizations to build and deploy more specialized, domain-specific applications.

In addition to Workers AI, Cloudflare’s AI Gateway offers a control plane for your AI applications, allowing developers to dynamically evaluate and route requests to different models and providers, eventually enabling developers to use data to create fine tunes and run the fine-tuned jobs directly on the Workers AI platform.

Cloudflare Powers One-Click Deployment with Hugging Face

With Workers AI generally available, developers can now deploy AI models in one click directly from Hugging Face, for the fastest way to access a variety of models and run inference requests on Cloudflare’s global network of GPUs. Developers can choose one of the popular open source models and then simply click “Deploy to Cloudflare Workers AI” to deploy a model instantly. There are 14 curated Hugging Face models now optimized for Cloudflare’s global serverless inference platform, supporting three different task categories including text generation, embeddings, and sentence similarity.

“We are excited to work with Cloudflare to make AI more accessible to developers,” said Julien Chaumond, co-founder and chief technology officer, Hugging Face. “Offering the most popular open models with a serverless API, powered by a global fleet of GPUs, is an amazing proposition for the Hugging Face community, and I can’t wait to see what they build with it.”

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business. Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.

Source: Cloudflare