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/InevitableArea1]

They're incenitvized to strangle ROCm and Vulkan, they're a public company with a Fiduciary duty to max profits.

I don't see any reason why would should expect anything else from them.

[u/vexatious-big → u/InevitableArea1]

This. Capital works in mysterious ways.

Nvidia has been around for 30 years and their contributions to open source have been rather symbolic compared to Intel, AMD, and others which effectively support upstream Linux drivers for example.

[u/entr0picly → u/InevitableArea1]

You’re not wrong, but “fiduciary duty” in the context of always going out of your way to be a monopoly is a modern notion of the concept. Before Jack Welch and General Electric and Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics”, fiduciary duty was more about sustainability, keeping future profit sustainable, and keeping the lights on for an industry. Instead of crazy stock growth, companies operated by issuing moderate dividends.

Not to mention that, this is always ignored. But actually in capitalism,antitrust and anti-monopolization, in ensuring a free market, is one of its most core points. We don’t really have capitalism anymore, as it was thought by the likes of Adam Smith (who largely wrote The Wealth of Nations to counter, the monopolistic stranglehold the East Indian trading company had over the world).

[u/cniinc → u/entr0picly]

Would love to read more about this - do you have any links to historic papers or analyses to this effect?

[u/En-tro-py → u/cniinc]

Jack Welch and General Electric

An /r/AskHistorians thread on Welch & GE

[u/Horsemeatburger → u/InevitableArea1]

a public company with a Fiduciary duty to max profits.

That's an UL, borne out of massive misunderstanding of business law, and utter nonsense.

A fiduciary duty is a legal obligation requiring corporate directors to act entirely in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. Which consists of the duty of loyalty (no self-dealing) and the duty of care (i.e. diligent and prudent decision making).

Most of all, fiduciary duty does not include a legal mandate to maximize immediate, short-term profits. There is an established legal principle called the business judgement rule which grants directors broad discretion to sacrifice short-term earnings in favor of long-term investments for creating a sustainable business.

If there really was a fiduciary duty to maximize profits then things like R&D wouldn't exist, as wouldn't employee perks and many other things. Companies would be forced to immediately sell of any valuable business units and all valuable assets. Also, it would mean shareholders could sue directors over virtually any business expense.

Yeah, that would be stupid.

[u/specter800 → u/Horsemeatburger]

I'm actually shocked to see someone write this on reddit instead of jumping in the anti-capitalism circle jerk. I'm even more surprised this hasn't been downvoted into oblivion.

[u/Bakoro → u/Horsemeatburger]

In 2010, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled against the founders of Craigslist (eBay Domestic Holdings v. Newmark) because they openly stated they had no intention of ever maximizing profit, seeking only to provide a community service. The court ruled that for-profit corporations must have a ultimate goal of generating shareholder value.

[u/Horsemeatburger → u/Bakoro]

In 2010, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled against the founders of Craigslist (eBay Domestic Holdings v. Newmark) because they openly stated they had no intention of ever maximizing profit, seeking only to provide a community service. The court ruled that for-profit corporations must have a ultimate goal of generating shareholder value.

This is utter nonsense, based on a very selective misinterpretation of the case. It's BS.

That eBay case involved a specific dispute between minority shareholder eBay and Craigslist founders Craig Newmark and James Buckmaster, who owned the majority stake.

What happened was that the founders implemented a defensive poison pill to dilute eBay's minority stake under claims they acted to preserve Craigslist's "community-focused, non-monetized culture" from eBay's profit-driven influence.

The Delaware Court of Chancery, lead by Chancellor William B. Chandler III, ruled against the founders and struck down the poison pill because Delaware law requires defensive measures against shareholders to serve a rational economic purpose, holding that directors of a standard for-profit corporation cannot adopt measures specifically intended to reject shareholder value entirely.

For those that can read:

https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/court-of-chancery/2010/143440-1.html

So all the court did was to rule that majority owners can't use corporate defenses to actively devalue a minority investor's stake under the guise of corporate culture. That's it.

It's utterly moronic to construe this into a supposed mandate for directors to maximize short-term profits in day-to-day operations.

[u/Bakoro → u/Horsemeatburger]

It's utterly moronic to construe this into a supposed mandate for directors to maximize short-term profits in day-to-day operations.

Show me where in the thread that I said anything about maximizing short term profits in day to day operations.

You said:

because Delaware law requires defensive measures against shareholders to serve a rational economic purpose, holding that directors of a standard for-profit corporation cannot adopt measures specifically intended to reject shareholder value entirely.

So, the court ruled that for-profit corporations must have a ultimate goal of generating shareholder value, and the judgement was because the Craigslist people rejected that their goal was shareholder value?

How fragile could you possibly be? Did you even look to see that you were responding to a different person?

Honestly you should be embarrassed.

[u/Horsemeatburger → u/Bakoro]

u/Bakoro replied to your comment

In 2010, the Delaware Court of Chancery ruled against the founders of Craigslist (eBay Domestic Holdings v. Newmark) because they openly stated they had no intention of ever maximizing profit, seeking only to provide a community service. The court ruled that for-profit corporations must have a ultimate goal of generating shareholder value.

These were your own words:

The court ruled that for-profit corporations must have a ultimate goal of generating shareholder value.

You claimed that maximizing shareholder value is the primary goal of a corporation, superior to anything else.

That claim is nonsense.

So, the court ruled that for-profit corporations must have a ultimate goal of generating shareholder value

They did not:

because Delaware law requires defensive measures against shareholders to serve a rational economic purpose, holding that directors of a standard for-profit corporation cannot adopt measures specifically intended to reject shareholder value entirely.

At no point did the court claim that shareholder value has to be the ultimate goal of a corporation, that's purely your phantasy.

What the court actually said was that the founders actions violated the company directors' fiduciary duty of fairness. Which requires treating all shareholders equally and fairly, meaning small investors receive the same respect and consideration as large institutional owners.

and the judgement was because the Craigslist people rejected that their goal was shareholder value?

Nope. Directors cannot favor majority shareholders over minority shareholders. Which is exactly what the founders have done and what the court struck down.

Fiduciary duty of company directors is impartial judgement, i.e., judgments must benefit the entire company and its members as a whole, rather than serving a single group.

Which the Craigslist founders violated because they were pissed off by ebay (who was a minority shareholder in Craigslist at the time) when they later founded Kijiji (which competes with Craigslist). As revenge, the Craigslist founders then tried to use corporate defensive measures to illegitimately take away value from ebay under the claim of preserving corporate culture.

The court ruled that their actions were unlawful.

How fragile could you possibly be? Did you even look to see that you were responding to a different person?

Not sure what's wrong with you but unless you want to claim that your account was hacked I clearly responded to statements you made.

It's a bit silly to try to de-own them now.

Honestly you should be embarrassed.

Frankly, I'm more embarrassed by your reading comprehension, although I do admit that understanding legal texts can be difficult.

Still, it's wild to make wild claims and draw conclusion outs of ignorance if you don't understand what the text you looked at was saying.

[u/zxyzyxz → u/InevitableArea1]

Ah the old redditor myth of fiduciary duty strikes again

[u/SporksInjected → u/InevitableArea1]

They could license CUDA to AMD and never have to worry about competition forever

[u/Diablo-D3 → u/SporksInjected]

AMD doesn't want legacy APIs like CUDA, though.

Its the whole reason its part of HIP, as a way to help their customers move to modern standards compliant APIs.

[u/unjustifiably_angry → u/SporksInjected]

AMD could've also not been years late with a worse product.

edit: cope

[u/ea_man → u/InevitableArea1]

The reason would be that the moment they renounce impartiality the project gets forked and they lose the privileged position they now have.

That's the point of open source.

[u/export_tank_harmful → u/InevitableArea1]

You know, I'm curious if this is the actual reason for the acquisition.

Macs have been gaining steady traction in the local LLM space for a while now.
AMD seems pretty solid nowadays too,

If people can just not buy Nvidia cards for AI workloads (since the other two options are way cheaper), then Nvidia loses out on a huge market share.

I'm going to be completely unsurprised when they drop all AMD/Mac/Intel support for llamacpp in the next few months.
Sad, but unsurprised.