Looking for CPU compute grant — FlashLM, ternary CPU-only language model
Hugging Face Forums [Unofficial]
February 19, 2026
Anyone know if HuggingFace offers CPU compute grants, or have suggestions for where to get donated CPU time for open-source research?
Hmm… When it comes to Hugging Face, the only thing that comes to mind is the Spaces Community Grant (below). There are quite a few research grants for other sites, but I don’t know much about the details.
What Hugging Face means by “community grants” for Spaces
A “community grant” (often referred to as a community GPU grant / community hardware grant) is Hugging Face assigning upgraded hardware to a specific Space , so you can run it without adding a payment card. The official docs point you to apply from the Space’s Settings tab. (Hugging Face)
How to request it (UI)
- Create a Space (Gradio / Streamlit / Docker) and make sure it builds and runs on the free CPU tier.
- Open your Space page, then click the Settings tab (top nav of the Space). (Hugging Face)
- Scroll to the Hardware section and select the hardware you want (for CPU, that’s typically CPU Upgrade). (Hugging Face)
- When you try to switch hardware, you should see an option to request a free upgrade / apply for a community grant (the GPU docs explicitly mention you can “request a free upgrade” from Settings). (Hugging Face)
- Submit the request form (it’s tied to that Space).
Notes:
- HF Spaces currently lists CPU Basic (2 vCPU / 16GB) and CPU Upgrade (8 vCPU / 32GB) as standard CPU options. (Hugging Face)
- HF’s Hub API docs also state that a payment card or a community grant is required to access upgraded hardware. (Hugging Face)
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