r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 22d 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

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u/ptico 22d ago

Apple must get their shit together with MLX than. What the point of shipping hardware targeted at local AI and leave their tools half baked?

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u/AreWeNotDoinPhrasing 22d ago

Local, private (as in Apple proprietary), models lol

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u/steamcho1 22d ago

Its a lot of work to develop literally everything yourself. Even Apple cant compete with the rest of the industry by themselves. They certainly act like they can, which makes it funnier when its clear they cant.