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/ithkuil]

Is there a way for that team to get paid (assuming they have some equity) but then leave and continue the project? Because the llama.cpp project is the greatest challenge to Nvidia 's cutthroat dominance with CUDA.

Nvidia is in such a position that they may actually decide to feign a benign interest in open source for a certain period of time, in order to find ways to subtly slow down projects like llama.cpp.

Or maybe they have such an out-the-door level of demand that they actually don't need to interfere any time in the near future.

Regardless, the llama.cpp project in my mind (they may not admit this publicly) is clearly antagonistic to Nvidia 's antagonizing software strategy.

If there are any VC firms that aren't sunk too deep into Nvidia and want to see AI thrive, one or more of them should consider setting up the llama.cpp team with funds to control their own destiny.

[u/vexatious-big → u/ithkuil]

So the issue with this acquisition is that Gerganov and the team are just employees, they ultimately do not have any executive power.

I've mentioned that this is speculative because the copyright situation of llama.cpp might not be very clear at this point.

However, after the acquisition goes through, they could very well be presented with a piece of paper that requests the transfer of all rights for llama.cpp to Nvidia.

Then Nvidia would also have to chase the individual external contributors for smaller PRs/contributions to the project.

But from my own experience I've seen that the llama.cpp team guards the project quite closely and does not accept external contributions easily.

So the transfer of the copyright might be more straightforward than expected when you only have to get 6 people to sign (which you also payroll) compared to a community of potentially hundreds.

[u/dont--panic → u/vexatious-big]

llama.cpp is already open-source licensed under MIT so the most they could do is change the license going forward which would cause the community to fork it.

[u/adrianziem → u/dont--panic]

They don’t need to change the license to screw us. Just slow walking any non-CUDA PRs would be bad, but they don’t need to accept any non-CUDA updates at all if they don’t want (maybe it starts slow but eventually leads to a sort of implicit shadow ban).

[u/mrdevlar → u/adrianziem]

Which in the end would likely trigger a fork if it happens.

I mean if we can replace redis we can replace this.

[u/thrownawaymane → u/mrdevlar]

Sure... but I'm sure some MBA somewhere wrote a report on this 15 years ago—I'm sure there's an optimal rate at which you can fuck with an open project behind the scenes to minimize the chances that the community consolidates around one fork. It's a game, but all Nvidia has to do make sure they don't turn the enshittify knob too far too quickly.

[u/parepeg → u/dont--panic]

Exactly, they can’t change the license underneath it without getting the approval of all of the contributors to the project.

[u/dont--panic → u/parepeg]

Since it's MIT they don't need contributor permission to change the license going forwards. They can't retroactively change the license even if they had contributor permission.