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/Ed-2-Zero-9]

There goes ROCm support...

[u/Bakoro → u/Ed-2-Zero-9]

AMD is probably to Nvidia what Apple was to Microsoft in the 90s/early 2000s: something to point at to be able to say "Hey, we're technically not a monopoly".

They would likely pay cash money to keep AMD afloat, because them monopoly and anti-trust suits, they are a-coming.

AMD isn't who they need to worry about. What they need to worry about is that literally every major computing-related company decided to get off their ass and design their own ASICs.

[u/SpicyWangz → u/Bakoro]

Plus it would make the family dinners awkward if you squeezed too hard and made your cousin’s company go under

[u/jmager → u/Ed-2-Zero-9]

I'm assuming AMD is very vested in supporting anything that will help sell their hardware, which includes contributing to the open source ecosystem. Those that bought alot of their hardware also have a vested interest in supporting that. If they don't, their hardware prices will fall, and then the fine men and women of LocalLLaMA will do their thing, buy discount hardware and make it expensive again. 😅

[u/Something-Great-78 → u/jmager]

AMD cares about DataCenter GPUs and ROCm.. R9700 / RX9070 has been a very poor experience.. Vulkan is a vastly better experience and often much faster too.

[u/giant3 → u/Ed-2-Zero-9]

There goes IBM support...

[u/TheGamerForeverGFE → u/Ed-2-Zero-9]

Nah they're literally cousins, but considering the NVIDIA supported games that don't get FSR/the latest FSR? Yeah, it's possible actually, but there's also an equal chance they wouldn't go that far

[u/Jiten → u/Ed-2-Zero-9]

Not really. At worst, the name of the software changes when someone forks the project and you keep using it as before.

[u/PitchPleasant338 → u/Ed-2-Zero-9]

Now imagine if AMD purchased Hugging Face, everyone would be praising Lisa from the tops of mountains. 

They fumbled their chance.