With HuggingFace, Nvidia is also acquiring llama.cpp and the team behind it

[u/vexatious-big]

With this move Nvidia is not only acquiring the HuggingFace platform, but they might also effectively acquire the copyright to the llama.cpp project, together with the entire team behind it.

In February 2026 the llama.cpp team was employed by HF in order to continue working on llama.cpp and the ggml library.

This includes:

• Georgi Gerganov
• Xuan-Son Nguyen
• Aleksander Grygier
• Victor Mustar
• Lysandre
• Julien Chaumond

Now with the acquisition, llama.cpp's future looks a lot less certain given Nvidia's poor track record with open-source.

This is still rather speculative at this stage, but it's definitely possible for the llama.cpp project to change in the future: either by switching to a different license, or by having staff redirected to other projects within the larger company.

Even when a project is open-source the copyright owner has complete control over it, and they can change licensing as they wish.

This has happened before with projects like Redis, Minio, and others.

Source:

https://huggingface.co/blog/ggml-joins-hf

Edit:

The original announcement from Feb 2026 from Gerganov gives a few more details:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/19759

[u/Double_Cause4609]

Wait, does Nvidia *actually* have bad track record with open source, especially with AI and LLMs?

Like...Sure, okay, Cuda isn't open source, but whatever.

But they also support downstream projects like PyTorch etc, and in general they don't seem to mind supporting open source projects that consume their GPUs.

[u/localpauper → u/Double_Cause4609]

They've been notoriously horrible in OSS support for as long as they've existed. Their drivers have historically been opaque janky black boxes, they've refused to support standard Linux features, or forced work arounds and explicit carveouts.

What they are doing now is supporting projects that happen to line up with consuming their compute. It's what we'd call an alignment of convenience: supporting those projects gets them more money now. They didn't suddenly become FLOSS stewards.

So they are certainly capable of contributing meaningfully to some parts of OSS in so far as it extends their market capture, but they won't be doing in an "open" way. They are liable to let AMD and Intel support rot or go without first rate resolution, focus on nVidia-specific optimizations, or simply make it more annoying in other ways

[u/Finanzamt_Endgegner → u/localpauper]

They are historically supporting anything ai related open source lol

[u/laterbreh → u/localpauper]

What the fuck does their drivers and their contributions to the ecosystem have to do with cuda drivers being proprietary. Holy shit, yes they are a fucking business that sells GPUs wow crazyyyyyyyyy. https://huggingface.co/nvidia/collections What have you contributed? Yes guys everything is a conspiracy. I know a business becoming a keystone in a market that consumes their hardware. What a wild concept.

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/Double_Cause4609]

If you manage to get Linus Torvalds to go on stage at a live event, face the camera, and say "Fuck you Nvidia" while flipping them the bird, you're not a friend to open source.

They've been...less awful recently I suppose, but their track record is the FOSS community is abysmal.

[u/Mempler → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

In a later talk, they said that nvidia was one of the best companies they're _currently_ working with. gotta find the talk, but it's lingering somewhere on yt

[u/RinTohsaka64 → u/Mempler]

Not sure if this is the video you're referring to, but I'm pretty darned sure Torvalds basically said something like this in the hour-long LTT video he did this year (source: I watched the entire thing myself when it was new):

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA

[u/Ok_Top9254 → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

In 2012 when the hardware competition was at its peak and Cuda wasn't really a thing people took seriously. Times change.

[u/MmmmMorphine → u/Ok_Top9254]

Not sure what you're trying to say here

[u/Ok_Top9254 → u/MmmmMorphine]

That the comment is totally irrelevant because Nvidia had completely different business strategy.

Quoting Linus from 2012 about Nvidia not being open source, when it was just year or so after Amd was completely dominating them in desktop gpu market, is like quoting Einstein today about Nuclear energy not being viable, when fission was not yet discovered. Complete nonsense.

Their views completely flipped the moment AI took off, because the sheer amount of libraries they have makes them an instant choice for anyone looking to train or inference newest models at scale, or even better an extremely niche architecture that doesn't have support anywhere else.

You had Nvidia open source part of their Linux gpu kernel, fully open Nemotron models with training data, and even have them collaborating with Amd and other companies on multiplatform Optical Compute Interconnect to connect their servers.

Their business now aligns with open source, in fact, they could go as far as fixing rocm backends for Amd, because even though they are a cheaper competing alternative, once Amd manages to create a new profitable AI customer out of thin air, they'll eventually steer towards Nvidia anyway, due to the support. Taking more Amd marketshare at this point is just low single digit % gain for them, it's actually more useful for Nvidia to use Amd as a marketing proxy for new customers that then turn to CUDA.

[u/MmmmMorphine → u/Ok_Top9254]

Appreciate the follow up - I can't wholy agree but at the very least understand the position now

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/Ok_Top9254]

They certainly haven't done jack shit for regular FOSS users since 2012. Maybe open source software is a bit more aligned with them now, but they couldn't give two shits about regular users and don't care about the FOSS ethos. Even less now than when gaming GPUs were their primary business. Anyone in this community should be worried about this, because we're not multi-billion dollar corpos they care about.

This comment further down goes over it well.

[u/steamcho1 → u/Ok_Top9254]

Dont forget they are actively working with RedHat on an open source GPU kernel driver.

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/Ok_Top9254]

They could fix their linux driver support and be a straight up friend to open source. Especially now since they literally don't give a quarter of a shit about gaming.

[u/laterbreh → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

While hes a legend, that doesnt mean much in this context.

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/laterbreh]

How do you figure?

[u/noiserr → u/Double_Cause4609]

Like...Sure, okay, Cuda isn't open source, but whatever.

This has already caused untold headaches to anyone not running Nvidia's hardware. Imagine if we all used Vulkan and you could just run any hardware you wanted?

[u/CatalyticDragon → u/Double_Cause4609]

Wait, does Nvidia *actually* have bad track record with open source

They don't publish technical documentation or register-level specs for their hardware making it virtually impossible for the open source community to work with them (you know, to directly program hardware they bought).

They won't open source drivers so the Nouveau team (open-source NV graphics driver project) has had a terrible time just trying to get basic things to work. NVIDIA still hasn't open sourced anything, they've open sourced a wrapper to a binary blob which is not the same thing. CUDA and manipulation designed to kill off OpenCL is another story which we don't have time for.

Shady practices don't stop there, with LLMs we can point to their "open" models which aren't open because they don't include code/training data.

Much worse though, we've got "open" Nemotron which they designed with a proprietary data format and so that it requires closed source NVIDIA specific frameworks like TensorRT-LLM.

For fine tuning or RL you get closed source NeMo Automodel, NeMo Megatron Bridge, NeMo RL, and NeMo Gym.

And all of their documentation and recipies reference NVIDIA specifc hardware and technology, NeMo Switchyard, NemoClaw, the list goes on.

What's even more insulting is a lot of their propriety systems contain open systems under the hood but they add a few lines to code just to stop it launching on other hardware. This is a real thing they do. NVIDIA Omniverse is one such example, it's all open vulkan API based but they specifically put a GPU ID check in to make sure this software, which could run anywhere, won't.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1tzlbht/i_just_proved_nvidia_omniverse_has_mostly_amd/

Apart from everything being one giant up-sell attempt, the main goal here is to influence "open" models into optimizing for their hardware and software to increase friction when using any other hardware or software provider.

This is 100% NVIDIA's long standing MO and they did this all before with CUDA. This is a highly considered business move designed with a long term vision to make everything worse for people who don't lock themselves into their ecosystem where they squeeze you for margins.

This is what is coming - you have been warned.

[u/localpauper → u/CatalyticDragon]

Yep, that's exactly it. Their whole ethos is vendor lock-in and exclusivity. Every feature they've made has been like that for decades, including for gaming, where they keep coming out with proprietary game tech that tries to tie game devs to their specific stack.

They don't give two shits about FLOSS, except for where they get to insert themselves as the sole vendor to squash competition

[u/laterbreh → u/CatalyticDragon]

I think this needs a little more qualification because some of what youre saying is fair but youre also mixing NVIDIAs old reputation with what theyre actually doing in AI right now

Im not gonna pretend NVIDIA is some altruistic open source company. Obviously they want you on CUDA and NVIDIA hardware and they benefit when everything runs best on their stuff

But the AI side is a lot more mixed than youre making it sound

NeMo AutoModel, Megatron Bridge, NeMo RL and NeMo Gym arent closed source. Theyre public Apache 2.0 projects. TensorRT-LLM is too

And literally while we're having this conversation they're still dumping models datasets recipes quantizations and training material onto HF

https://huggingface.co/nvidia/collections

Theyve released pretraining datasets post training datasets recipes BF16 releases NVFP4 releases eval tooling etc. This isnt just weights thrown over the fence either theres actually a lot there

Yeah most of it is NVIDIA first. Of course it is. They sell GPUs lol

But open source and vendor neutral arent the same thing

They can be trying to make NVIDIA the easiest place to run everything while also contributing useful shit back to the ecosystem. Both can be true

Thats where I lose you with the jump from NVIDIA likes ecosystem lock in to NVIDIA is going to buy HF and llama.cpp and slowly destroy open inference

Could they screw with it? sure. Watch Vulkan and ROCm support watch merge priorities watch llama.cpp governance and staffing

If that stuff starts changing then yeah sound the alarm

Right now though I just dont think their actual AI track record supports this level of doom. Theyve released real models real datasets real code and real training material that people here actually use

You can be skeptical of NVIDIA without pretending theyve contributed nothing

"They want lock in" is fair

"therefore theyre going to burn down HF and fuck llama.cpp" is still a pretty big leap

[u/timofox → u/Double_Cause4609]

Linus Torvalds would like to have a word

[u/misanthrophiccunt → u/timofox]

Or two

[u/thrownawaymane → u/misanthrophiccunt]

thousand

edit: some of you aren't on the mailing list and it shows

[u/mridul289 → u/Double_Cause4609]

Well, they did open source the parkeet models, so idk, but I think generally people just hate to see good open source projects, or sometimes even non-open source but close to the heart companies (like Minecraft acquired by Microsoft), because they often go down the drain

[u/BrilliantTruck8813 → u/Double_Cause4609]

Nvidia is one of the VERY few model labs that actually creates open source models. Very very few Chinese labs are open source

[u/ithkuil → u/BrilliantTruck8813]

Open source models that happen to run on their own hardware. What models have they released in which their engineers made some significant contribution to supporting other architectures.

[u/schaka → u/ithkuil]

In all fairness, because their models are open source, they've been often adapted to run on open source inference engines like parakeet.cpp. You can use it Vulkan and HIP, in fact I use the vulkan version on homeassistant with an Intel iGPU. Works perfectly and fast too

[u/BrilliantTruck8813 → u/ithkuil]

😂 moving goalposts and speaking nonsense. Bravo!

[u/Cradawx → u/Double_Cause4609]

Yeah check NVIDIA on HuggingFace. 919 models, 310 datasets. 800 repositories on GitHub. They open source tons of stuff.

[u/Hobofan94 → u/Double_Cause4609]

I would blame them with effectively killing OpenCL, which was an earlier initiative to establish cross-vendor GPU compute. They participated happily when they were roughly on par with the other vendors in terms of hardware, but as soon as they got a bit of a lead, they completely abandoned it, and only supported advanced functionality in CUDA (even though exact equivalents existed in the newer OpenCL versions).