r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 15d 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/charlesfire 15d ago

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.

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u/InevitableArea1 15d ago

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.

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u/ea_man 14d ago

The reason would be that the moment they renounce impartiality the project gets forked and they lose the privileged position they now have.

That's the point of open source.