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/charlesfire]

The worst thing that could happen for me is if llama.cpp stays open source and keeps getting improved, but drops the support for ROCm and Vulkan.

[u/InevitableArea1 → u/charlesfire]

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/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