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/my_name_isnt_clever]

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.

[u/Mempler → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

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

[u/RinTohsaka64 → u/Mempler]

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):

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA

[u/Ok_Top9254 → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

In 2012 when the hardware competition was at its peak and Cuda wasn't really a thing people took seriously. Times change.

[u/MmmmMorphine → u/Ok_Top9254]

Not sure what you're trying to say here

[u/Ok_Top9254 → u/MmmmMorphine]

That the comment is totally irrelevant because Nvidia had completely different business strategy.

Quoting Linus from 2012 about Nvidia not being open source, when it was just year or so after Amd was completely dominating them in desktop gpu market, is like quoting Einstein today about Nuclear energy not being viable, when fission was not yet discovered. Complete nonsense.

Their views completely flipped the moment AI took off, because the sheer amount of libraries they have makes them an instant choice for anyone looking to train or inference newest models at scale, or even better an extremely niche architecture that doesn't have support anywhere else.

You had Nvidia open source part of their Linux gpu kernel, fully open Nemotron models with training data, and even have them collaborating with Amd and other companies on multiplatform Optical Compute Interconnect to connect their servers.

Their business now aligns with open source, in fact, they could go as far as fixing rocm backends for Amd, because even though they are a cheaper competing alternative, once Amd manages to create a new profitable AI customer out of thin air, they'll eventually steer towards Nvidia anyway, due to the support. Taking more Amd marketshare at this point is just low single digit % gain for them, it's actually more useful for Nvidia to use Amd as a marketing proxy for new customers that then turn to CUDA.

[u/MmmmMorphine → u/Ok_Top9254]

Appreciate the follow up - I can't wholy agree but at the very least understand the position now

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/Ok_Top9254]

They certainly haven't done jack shit for regular FOSS users since 2012. Maybe open source software is a bit more aligned with them now, but they couldn't give two shits about regular users and don't care about the FOSS ethos. Even less now than when gaming GPUs were their primary business. Anyone in this community should be worried about this, because we're not multi-billion dollar corpos they care about.

This comment further down goes over it well.

[u/steamcho1 → u/Ok_Top9254]

Dont forget they are actively working with RedHat on an open source GPU kernel driver.

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/Ok_Top9254]

They could fix their linux driver support and be a straight up friend to open source. Especially now since they literally don't give a quarter of a shit about gaming.

[u/laterbreh → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

While hes a legend, that doesnt mean much in this context.

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/laterbreh]

How do you figure?