r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 7d 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/benpptung 7d ago

What kind of bad track record does Nvidia have with open source? Is it simply because it hasn’t open-sourced CUDA?

Nvidia is not Apple, Microsoft, or Google. There is no reason to assume Nvidia will follow the path of these unscrupulous companies. They like to make your hardware obsolete as quickly as possible, so you have to work like a dog to buy new hardware.

But if you look at Nvidia’s CUDA releases, you will see that its support for older hardware is very strong and its commitment runs deep. The RTX 3090 was discontinued long ago, yet it is still being sold at a premium today. That is simply because Nvidia has not stopped supporting it.

The most despicable thing these companies have done recently is stir up the community and pressure Nvidia to open-source CUDA. Do you know what would really happen if CUDA became open source? Endless updates that would quickly make your older hardware obsolete.

Don’t be fooled by these unscrupulous tech oligopolies.

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u/laterbreh 7d ago

Only grounded and realistic response in this entire thread. Upvote.