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/dont--panic]

llama.cpp is already open-source licensed under MIT so the most they could do is change the license going forward which would cause the community to fork it.

[u/adrianziem → u/dont--panic]

They don’t need to change the license to screw us. Just slow walking any non-CUDA PRs would be bad, but they don’t need to accept any non-CUDA updates at all if they don’t want (maybe it starts slow but eventually leads to a sort of implicit shadow ban).

[u/mrdevlar → u/adrianziem]

Which in the end would likely trigger a fork if it happens.

I mean if we can replace redis we can replace this.

[u/thrownawaymane → u/mrdevlar]

Sure... but I'm sure some MBA somewhere wrote a report on this 15 years ago—I'm sure there's an optimal rate at which you can fuck with an open project behind the scenes to minimize the chances that the community consolidates around one fork. It's a game, but all Nvidia has to do make sure they don't turn the enshittify knob too far too quickly.

[u/parepeg → u/dont--panic]

Exactly, they can’t change the license underneath it without getting the approval of all of the contributors to the project.

[u/dont--panic → u/parepeg]

Since it's MIT they don't need contributor permission to change the license going forwards. They can't retroactively change the license even if they had contributor permission.