Thomas Wolf
Co-founder and CSO of Hugging Face; French AI researcher and open-source ML advocate.
Last refreshed: 22 April 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why is an open-source AI pioneer betting on synthetic natural gas?
Timeline for Thomas Wolf
Angel-invested in Rivan's £25m fundraise
UK Startups and Innovation: Rivan raises £25m for Europe's biggest SNG plant- Who is Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face?
- Thomas Wolf is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI and ML platform. He is a French researcher with a physics background who helped build Hugging Face's Transformers library into the standard for LLM development.
- Why did Thomas Wolf invest in a gas company?
- Wolf angel-invested in Rivan's £25m Project Steadfast round in April 2026. Rivan makes synthetic natural gas (SNG) from renewable electricity and captured CO₂, addressing the industrial energy demand that AI infrastructure growth is intensifying.Source: Lowdown
- What is the Hugging Face Transformers library?
- Hugging Face's Transformers library is an open-source toolkit for building and deploying large language models and other ML models. It became the de facto standard for LLM research and is used by companies and academic institutions worldwide.
- Is Hugging Face open source?
- Yes. Hugging Face is built around open-source principles. Its Transformers library, model hub, and datasets are publicly accessible. The company hosts hundreds of thousands of open-source models contributed by the global ML research community.
Background
Thomas Wolf angel-invested in Rivan's £25m Project Steadfast round on 20 April 2026, contributing to Europe's largest planned synthetic natural gas facility in Wiltshire alongside IQ Capital, Plural, Matt Clifford, and Markus Villig. Wolf's participation illustrates a crossover thesis: AI infrastructure demands enormous energy, and the researchers building that infrastructure are now backing the energy-transition companies needed to supply it.
Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI and machine learning platform. With a background in physics and signal processing, he joined co-founders Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond in building Hugging Face into the central library for open-source ML models, datasets, and applications. The platform hosts hundreds of thousands of models and is used by researchers and companies worldwide; its Transformers library became the de facto standard for large-language model development.
Wolf's move into Energy infrastructure is consistent with a broader pattern among European AI founders who are confronting the resource constraints of their own sector. Rivan's SNG technology, which converts renewable electricity and captured CO₂ into pipeline-compatible gas, directly addresses the hard-to-abate industrial heat demand that electric grids alone cannot yet meet.