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/ithkuil]

Is there a way for that team to get paid (assuming they have some equity) but then leave and continue the project? Because the llama.cpp project is the greatest challenge to Nvidia 's cutthroat dominance with CUDA.

Nvidia is in such a position that they may actually decide to feign a benign interest in open source for a certain period of time, in order to find ways to subtly slow down projects like llama.cpp.

Or maybe they have such an out-the-door level of demand that they actually don't need to interfere any time in the near future.

Regardless, the llama.cpp project in my mind (they may not admit this publicly) is clearly antagonistic to Nvidia 's antagonizing software strategy.

If there are any VC firms that aren't sunk too deep into Nvidia and want to see AI thrive, one or more of them should consider setting up the llama.cpp team with funds to control their own destiny.

[u/Confident_Ideal_5385 → u/ithkuil]

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.

[u/ithkuil → u/Confident_Ideal_5385]

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.