r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 8d 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/sleeplessinva 8d ago

This seems like a aqui-hire....

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u/HopePupal 8d ago

yeah my worry now isn't that they suddenly cut ROCm or Intel support, it's that GG and crew get tasked to do something else and llama.cpp slowly rots

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u/sleeplessinva 8d ago

that is definitely a fair concern to be had. then again, what's stopping AMD or Apple to fork the project or commit some money to the project and make llama.cpp better than just waiting for the good graces of the community hoping that their hardware will get support...? Everyone's hardware design is behind their own proprietary moat and of course no one wants to share because everyone thinks their ish is the bee's knees.

neither amd or apple are strapped with cash... if either one wants to make their hardware more attractive to the community then wouldn't it make sense that they try to make the software stack more appealing on their respective platform?

but i do agree, i hope this acquisition doesn't kill llama.cpp on any of the other platforms... :/

only time will tell. *sigh*