May 22 (Reuters) - Amazon.com's ( AMZN ) cloud unit on

Wednesday said it has partnered with artificial intelligence

startup Hugging Face to make it easier to run thousands of AI

models on Amazon's ( AMZN ) custom computing chips.

Valued at $4.5 billion, Hugging Face has become a central

hub for AI researchers and developers to share chatbots and

other AI software and is backed by Amazon ( AMZN ), Alphabet's Google

and Nvidia ( NVDA ), among others. It is the main

place that developers go to obtain and tinker with open-source

AI models such as Meta Platforms' ( META ) Llama 3.

But once developers have tweaked an open-source AI model

they typically want to use the model to power a piece of

software. On Wednesday, Amazon ( AMZN ) and Hugging Face said they had

paired up to make it possible to do so on a custom Amazon Web

Services (AWS) chip called Inferentia2.

"One thing that's very important to us is efficiency -

making sure that as many people as possible can run models and

that they can run them in the most cost effective way," said

Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face.

For its part, AWS is hoping to lure more AI developers to

use its cloud services for delivering AI. While Nvidia ( NVDA ) dominates

the market for training models, AWS argues it chips can then

operate those trained models - a process called inference - at

lower cost over time.

"You train these models maybe once a month. But you may be

running inference against them tens of thousands of times an

hour. That's where Inferentia2 really shines," said Matt Wood,

who oversees artificial intelligence products at AWS.