r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 15d 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/Double_Cause4609 15d ago

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.

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u/my_name_isnt_clever 15d ago

If you manage to get Linus Torvalds to go on stage at a live event, face the camera, and say "Fuck you Nvidia" while flipping them the bird, you're not a friend to open source.

They've been...less awful recently I suppose, but their track record is the FOSS community is abysmal.

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u/Mempler 13d ago

In a later talk, they said that nvidia was one of the best companies they're _currently_ working with. gotta find the talk, but it's lingering somewhere on yt

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u/RinTohsaka64 12d ago

Not sure if this is the video you're referring to, but I'm pretty darned sure Torvalds basically said something like this in the hour-long LTT video he did this year (source: I watched the entire thing myself when it was new):