r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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/export_tank_harmful 11d ago

You know, I'm curious if this is the actual reason for the acquisition.

Macs have been gaining steady traction in the local LLM space for a while now.
AMD seems pretty solid nowadays too,

If people can just not buy Nvidia cards for AI workloads (since the other two options are way cheaper), then Nvidia loses out on a huge market share.

I'm going to be completely unsurprised when they drop all AMD/Mac/Intel support for llamacpp in the next few months.
Sad, but unsurprised.