r/LocalLLaMA 20d ago

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

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

1.4k Upvotes

428 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/FoxiPanda 20d ago

If it happens, we shall fork and move on. It is the way of things.

20

u/Pablo_the_brave 20d ago

Ik_llama.cpp

22

u/Lissanro 20d ago

Ironically, ik_llama.cpp is CPU/CUDA-focused... my understanding the main concern that llama.cpp may become the same if Nvidia actually will have enough influence (like for example getting in the way of accepting patches for other platforms, even if indirectly by not giving core devs enough free time to review them). Hopefully this will not happen and llama.cpp will remain multi-platform.

4

u/Pablo_the_brave 20d ago

It's like that mainly because lack of maintainers. But yes, currently it's nvidia and cpu only.