Nvidia reportedly acquiring Hugging Face for $13 billion

Nvidia is reportedly acquiring Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI model repository, in a deal valued at $13 billion. This acquisition would also include the team behind the popular open-source projects `llama.cpp` and `ggml`, who joined Hugging Face in February 2026. This acquisition places the central hub of the open-source AI ecosystem under the control of the dominant AI hardware provider, potentially reshaping how open models are distributed and optimized. It also raises questions about the future independence of critical local inference tools that rely on Hugging Face's hosted projects. Because Hugging Face employs the core developers of `llama.cpp` and the `ggml` library, Nvidia could effectively gain copyright control over these projects. This ownership gives Nvidia the power to change licensing terms or redirect development resources, mirroring past license shifts in other open-source projects.