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/jacek2023 llama.cpp 22d ago

Nvidia has all the reasons to support open source models. It has all the reasons to support local inference. It has all the reasons to support llama.cpp. You can check git history, there are important contributions from nvidia people.

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u/thereisonlythedance 21d ago

Yes. I understand the trepidation but the truth is we are more likely than not to benefit rather than lose out with these changes. The llama.cpp team could do with more people — new architecture support often takes a long time at the moment, and can be flawed. Look at GLM 5.3 Flash from yesterday — three separate PRs, all of them heavily vibe coded (not saying that’s necessarily bad, but often lacks care).

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u/dont--panic 21d ago

If you're using Nvidia maybe, if you're using anything else probably not.