NVIDIA reportedly buys HuggingFace for 13 billion

Damn, I hope this is not goodbye to uncensored models 😢

gizmodo.com/nvidia-reportedly-stops-flirting-with-hugging-face-and-just-buys-it-2000803681

The core llama.cpp maintainers also work at HF and will now work for Nvidia I guess. Llama.cpp is a pretty significant part of the local LLM stack, especially since other tools like Ollama and LMStudio are just GUIs built on top.

Local LLMs have gotten to the point where they are a serious threat to Anthropic and OpenAI, and Nvidia has a lot of skin in the game. If Nvidia wanted to do some serious damage to local LLMs, they are now in a position to do so.

I’m also imagining they may try to squeeze out support for other GPU vendors. I’m using an AMD 7900 XTX to run Qwen 3.8 27B that I downloaded from HF to run on llama.cpp, which currently works like a dream. The 7900 XTX is the only sanely priced 24GB GPU left in 2026 (under $1k vs. $2k, $3k, $4k for Nvidia 24-32GB cards). Combined with OpenCode or Pi, a setup like this basically eliminates the need to use Anthropic or OpenAI products in the same way Jellyfin eliminates the need to use streaming services.

I’m sure Nvidia and their buddies don’t like one thing I’ve said in this comment and may very well be plotting to put a stop to it, so the community may need to step up our game and get our eggs out of the big tech basket.

Well the good news is they can’t take away from you what you already have. It being an open source project, I’m assuming if they do anything to deliberately gut AMD performance, it’ll get forked.

Also

The 7900 XTX is the only sanely priced 24GB GPU left in 2026 (under $1k vs. $2k, $3k, $4k for Nvidia 24-32GB cards).

Not on sale anymore, at least not at any vendor in my country, I searched an aggregate pricing website. Amazon has a few used ones left of some models, but that’s probably a 2 or 3 digit figure across SKUs. Hold on to yours with an iron grip.

What kind of tok/s are you getting with it on Qwen 3.8 27B and how’s the output quality? I may consider getting one if I can find one used or import from abroad.