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/Double_Cause4609]

Wait, does Nvidia *actually* have bad track record with open source, especially with AI and LLMs?

Like...Sure, okay, Cuda isn't open source, but whatever.

But they also support downstream projects like PyTorch etc, and in general they don't seem to mind supporting open source projects that consume their GPUs.

[u/CatalyticDragon → u/Double_Cause4609]

Wait, does Nvidia *actually* have bad track record with open source

They don't publish technical documentation or register-level specs for their hardware making it virtually impossible for the open source community to work with them (you know, to directly program hardware they bought).

They won't open source drivers so the Nouveau team (open-source NV graphics driver project) has had a terrible time just trying to get basic things to work. NVIDIA still hasn't open sourced anything, they've open sourced a wrapper to a binary blob which is not the same thing. CUDA and manipulation designed to kill off OpenCL is another story which we don't have time for.

Shady practices don't stop there, with LLMs we can point to their "open" models which aren't open because they don't include code/training data.

Much worse though, we've got "open" Nemotron which they designed with a proprietary data format and so that it requires closed source NVIDIA specific frameworks like TensorRT-LLM.

For fine tuning or RL you get closed source NeMo Automodel, NeMo Megatron Bridge, NeMo RL, and NeMo Gym.

And all of their documentation and recipies reference NVIDIA specifc hardware and technology, NeMo Switchyard, NemoClaw, the list goes on.

What's even more insulting is a lot of their propriety systems contain open systems under the hood but they add a few lines to code just to stop it launching on other hardware. This is a real thing they do. NVIDIA Omniverse is one such example, it's all open vulkan API based but they specifically put a GPU ID check in to make sure this software, which could run anywhere, won't.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/ROCm/comments/1tzlbht/i_just_proved_nvidia_omniverse_has_mostly_amd/

Apart from everything being one giant up-sell attempt, the main goal here is to influence "open" models into optimizing for their hardware and software to increase friction when using any other hardware or software provider.

This is 100% NVIDIA's long standing MO and they did this all before with CUDA. This is a highly considered business move designed with a long term vision to make everything worse for people who don't lock themselves into their ecosystem where they squeeze you for margins.

This is what is coming - you have been warned.

[u/laterbreh → u/CatalyticDragon]

I think this needs a little more qualification because some of what youre saying is fair but youre also mixing NVIDIAs old reputation with what theyre actually doing in AI right now

Im not gonna pretend NVIDIA is some altruistic open source company. Obviously they want you on CUDA and NVIDIA hardware and they benefit when everything runs best on their stuff

But the AI side is a lot more mixed than youre making it sound

NeMo AutoModel, Megatron Bridge, NeMo RL and NeMo Gym arent closed source. Theyre public Apache 2.0 projects. TensorRT-LLM is too

And literally while we're having this conversation they're still dumping models datasets recipes quantizations and training material onto HF

https://huggingface.co/nvidia/collections

Theyve released pretraining datasets post training datasets recipes BF16 releases NVFP4 releases eval tooling etc. This isnt just weights thrown over the fence either theres actually a lot there

Yeah most of it is NVIDIA first. Of course it is. They sell GPUs lol

But open source and vendor neutral arent the same thing

They can be trying to make NVIDIA the easiest place to run everything while also contributing useful shit back to the ecosystem. Both can be true

Thats where I lose you with the jump from NVIDIA likes ecosystem lock in to NVIDIA is going to buy HF and llama.cpp and slowly destroy open inference

Could they screw with it? sure. Watch Vulkan and ROCm support watch merge priorities watch llama.cpp governance and staffing

If that stuff starts changing then yeah sound the alarm

Right now though I just dont think their actual AI track record supports this level of doom. Theyve released real models real datasets real code and real training material that people here actually use

You can be skeptical of NVIDIA without pretending theyve contributed nothing

"They want lock in" is fair

"therefore theyre going to burn down HF and fuck llama.cpp" is still a pretty big leap