Does the file hosting actually cost peanuts when you do it yourself and the cloud has shattered my understanding of what it actually costs to deliver so much data?
At the scale of Huggingface, that still amounts to a lot load of money. Significantly less than if you did the same in AWS, but still a lot
That said, they do have a deal with AWS to make the data available in AWS ip space. Maybe they got some cheap hosting out of that too
As long as you're smart on caching on the edges and deduplication/overlaying with your content (which structured data types like models, containers and repos typically are fit for) you can get remarkably far for less than you'd think.
The economics of serving models seem to be way more dodgy.
CDN costs are pennies compared to inference and training though, HuggingFace will just get another 100 million and be set.