One would assume.

Just out of curiosity, how did Hugging Face have the money to run that operation?

VC funding (much of it from big tech). They have a freemium model and offer some pay for enterprise features, really just private repos, permissioning, etc. but not sure if it is meaningful

Why platform? Bitorrent is the best for all these read-only model files laying on SSDs. Agreed some tiny DHT model search engine would be nice.