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Hippius has positioned its model and container registry, Hippius Hub, as a hardware-neutral alternative to Hugging Face following reports that Nvidia has agreed to acquire the open source AI platform for $12.9 billion.
Full breakdown here: https://t.co/QFRXIjewyZ
— Hippius (@Hippius_cloud) August 28, 2026
Hugging Face hosts close to 2.96 million model repositories under licenses it does not write, and its Optimum libraries carry support for AMD, Intel, and AWS silicon alongside Nvidia's TensorRT-LLM. Hippius says the acquisition puts custody of that infrastructure with a company that manufactures the hardware those models run on, and that a registry holding the open model commons should not have an owner with a stake in the outcome.
Hippius Hub runs a model registry and a standard OCI container registry from the same namespace, with shared authentication and backing storage. Public models and container images pull without an account, no login and no API key. Hippius sells neither silicon nor inference, and the company says no accelerator earns it more than another.
Storage capacity comes from independent miners operating on Bittensor's Subnet 75, who earn the network's alpha token for uptime and verified delivery. Every storage claim, payment, and miner action is recorded on Hippius's own blockchain rather than an internal ledger. Files are encrypted on the client side before upload, then split by Reed-Solomon erasure coding into 30 shards, any 10 of which reconstruct the original, allowing 20 simultaneous miner failures without data loss. Miners hold encrypted fragments and have no access to raw user data.
The free tier hosts public models on its own. Hugging Face Pro is priced at $9 per month, and Hippius says its paid tiers come in below that. S3-compatible storage on the network runs $0.003 per GB per month with no egress fee, billed in credits at one credit to the dollar.
Two Bittensor subnets already route production data through the network. Beam, operating as Subnet 105, completed its first subnet-to-subnet transfer earlier this month by moving 107 GB from Cloudflare R2 to Hippius in roughly six minutes, the first production data movement between two decentralized subnets without a centralized intermediary handling the path. Minos routes genomic BAM files through Hippius Subnet 75 alongside Cloudflare R2 and an AWS S3 fallback.
Read their full announcement: Hugging Face Alternatives: Switch to Hippius Hub
