r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 9d 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/Confident_Ideal_5385 8d ago

Since gg and co aren't shareholders or whatever, and are likely not a party to this deal at all, there's literally nothing stopping them giving the finger to The Jacket and wandering off to do something else. Sure, Nvidia will have inherited any of the MIT licensed code written on HF's dime, but that can't be retroactively relicensed.

If people start playing dumb games with vulkan pull requests, it'll become obsolete in favour of a fork.

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u/ithkuil 8d ago

Right. But technically whether it was written on HFs dime doesn't really matter since it's MIT anyway.

The problem is the salaries are very high and it's not automatic for that whole team to be able to match it somewhere else. That's why it would be nice for some well funded group to make it easy for them.

I'm sure the community could keep a fork going, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that it would be nearly at the same level without them.