---
title: "AI Hardware Choices are Highly Variable and Sparsely Disclosed"
# subtitle: "What the top 4,000 models on Hugging Face reveal about hardware transparency - and why disclosure should be a release norm"
description: "A systematic audit of training- and inference-hardware disclosure across the top 4,000 most-downloaded models on Hugging Face, and the case for treating hardware as standard model-release documentation."
authors:
  - name: "Francisco Ríos"
    affiliations: [2]
    equalContribution: true
  - name: "Ian Reynolds"
    affiliations: [1]
    equalContribution: true
  - name: "Robert Praas"
    affiliations: [2]
  - name: "Avijit Ghosh"
    affiliations: [1]
    advisor: true
  - name: "Irene Solaiman"
    affiliations: [1]
    advisor: true
equalContributionNote: "These authors contributed equally."
advisorNote: "Advisors."
affiliations:
  - name: "Hugging Face"
    url: "https://huggingface.co"
    logo: "/image/hf-logo.png"
  - name: "Centre for European Policy Studies"
    url: "https://www.ceps.eu"
    logo: "/image/ceps-logo.png"
published: "Jun. 04, 2026"
licence: >
  Text and figures are licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">CC BY 4.0</a>, unless noted otherwise.
  Figures reused from other sources are excluded and marked in their captions (“Figure from …”).
tags:
  - AI hardware
  - compute
  - transparency
  - policy
  - open weights
tableOfContentsAutoCollapse: true
showPdf: true
---

import ExecutiveSummary from "./chapters/executive-summary.mdx";
import Introduction from "./chapters/introduction.mdx";
import Training from "./chapters/training.mdx";
import Inference from "./chapters/inference.mdx";
import Conclusion from "./chapters/conclusion.mdx";
import Appendix from "./chapters/appendix.mdx";
import AuthorContributions from "../components/AuthorContributions.astro";

<ExecutiveSummary />

<Introduction />

<Training />

<Inference />

<Conclusion />

<Appendix />

export const authorContributions = [
  { role: "Conceptualization",          people: "R. Praas, A. Ghosh" },
  { role: "Data curation",              people: "F. Ríos, R. Praas" },
  { role: "Investigation",              people: "I. Reynolds, A. Ghosh, R. Praas" },
  { role: "Methodology",                people: "F. Ríos, R. Praas, A. Ghosh" },
  { role: "Software",                   people: "F. Ríos" },
  { role: "Validation",                 people: "F. Ríos, I. Reynolds, R. Praas, A. Ghosh" },
  { role: "Formal analysis",            people: "I. Reynolds, A. Ghosh, R. Praas" },
  { role: "Writing (original draft)",   people: "F. Ríos, I. Reynolds, A. Ghosh, R. Praas" },
  { role: "Writing (review & editing)", people: "F. Ríos, I. Reynolds, A. Ghosh, R. Praas, I. Solaiman" },
  { role: "Visualization",              people: "F. Ríos" },
  { role: "Supervision",                people: "A. Ghosh, I. Solaiman" },
];

<AuthorContributions contributions={authorContributions} />

<div id="references" class="references">

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</div>
