Most Downloaded AI Models Released in 2026 on Hugging Face

What this chart shows. The fifteen most downloaded model repositories that were created on Hugging Face during 2026, measured over the last thirty days and read on 21 September 2026 at 08:19 UTC. Comfy-Org's single-file build of MiniMax-H3 leads with 20,700,265 downloads, ahead of Google's gemma-4-26B-A4B-it on 10,031,000. Nine of the fifteen carry a Qwen version number: seven published by Qwen itself and two repackaged by others, NVIDIA's NVFP4 build and unsloth's GGUF build. Together the fifteen account for 127,061,990 downloads in thirty days.

How the data is collected. Downloads are counted by the Hub itself, server-side, as requests to a repository's query file, with GGUF files counted individually and the diffusers library using its own filter. The 2026 filter here is mine rather than the Hub's: the API offers no ranking by release date, so the 5,000 most downloaded repositories on the Hub were read in order and the ones whose repository was created on or after 1 January 2026 were kept. 1,385 of those 5,000 repositories were created in 2026. The 5,000th repository in the ranking had 26,537 downloads over the thirty days, so any 2026 repository below that level could not have appeared here.

Background. A model reaches the Hub as several repositories rather than one. The leader of this list is not MiniMax's own upload: it is a single-file build published by Comfy-Org for ComfyUI, which the Hub's own metadata marks as based on MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3, while MiniMaxAI's own repository of that model is a separate entry with 4,057,444 downloads over the same thirty days. Six further entries ship a packaged format rather than plain weight files: three FP8 builds from Qwen, NVIDIA's NVFP4 build, and two GGUF repositories, unsloth's copy of Qwen3.8-27B and ornith-ai's build of its own Ornith-1.5-9B. The documentation is explicit that GGUF files are counted individually because they are self-contained and tied to no single library.

Limits. The date used is the date the repository was created on the Hub, which the API returns as createdAt, and that is not always the day the model was announced. Repositories that existed before the Hub's migration in March 2022 all carry that migration date instead, which does not affect a 2026 list but does mean the field is a repository record rather than a release date. Attention and downloads also part company here: farbodtavakkoli's OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT, a telecom model, has 21 likes against 6,581,143 downloads, while Qwen3.8-27B, on a similar 7,331,932 downloads, has 15,900.