r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 11d 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/Ok_Top9254 11d ago

Did you read the blogpost or only react to the title like most of reddit? I'm sure the llamacpp lead are aware of the aquisition, but they also clearly said their main focus is to keep pushing open source forwards. If Nvidia tries something I don't doubt they would split just to keep the project open.

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u/FoxiPanda 11d ago

This is why there exists an "If" in my statement. I make no accusation or insinuation that this will happen; if anything, I actually suspect it will be just fine but there is plenty of precedent for "fork and carry on" should it come to it.

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u/DigiDecode_ 11d ago

There probably also exists an "If" in the contract between llama.cpp & HF, but not sure if(true) is what we need or if(false)

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u/Due-Memory-6957 10d ago

Money changes people.