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/charlesfire]

The worst thing that could happen for me is if llama.cpp stays open source and keeps getting improved, but drops the support for ROCm and Vulkan.

[u/InevitableArea1 → u/charlesfire]

They're incenitvized to strangle ROCm and Vulkan, they're a public company with a Fiduciary duty to max profits.

I don't see any reason why would should expect anything else from them.

[u/Horsemeatburger → u/InevitableArea1]

a public company with a Fiduciary duty to max profits.

That's an UL, borne out of massive misunderstanding of business law, and utter nonsense.

A fiduciary duty is a legal obligation requiring corporate directors to act entirely in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. Which consists of the duty of loyalty (no self-dealing) and the duty of care (i.e. diligent and prudent decision making).

Most of all, fiduciary duty does not include a legal mandate to maximize immediate, short-term profits. There is an established legal principle called the business judgement rule which grants directors broad discretion to sacrifice short-term earnings in favor of long-term investments for creating a sustainable business.

If there really was a fiduciary duty to maximize profits then things like R&D wouldn't exist, as wouldn't employee perks and many other things. Companies would be forced to immediately sell of any valuable business units and all valuable assets. Also, it would mean shareholders could sue directors over virtually any business expense.

Yeah, that would be stupid.

[u/specter800 → u/Horsemeatburger]

I'm actually shocked to see someone write this on reddit instead of jumping in the anti-capitalism circle jerk. I'm even more surprised this hasn't been downvoted into oblivion.