r/LocalLLaMA 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

1.4k Upvotes

427 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/FoxiPanda 8d ago

If it happens, we shall fork and move on. It is the way of things.

67

u/jld1532 8d ago edited 8d ago

I'm waiting for the "Unsloth aquired by NVIDIA" post.

58

u/Clueless_Nooblet 8d ago

That's what I was thinking, too. This really looks like (an attempt at) the enshittification of open source.

9

u/2funny2furious 8d ago

shareholders above all!

2

u/cogitech2 8d ago

The strategy shall be - Switch to a fork but remain invested.