Nvidia bulks up open source offerings with an acquisition and new open AI models
Nvidia continues to expand its footprint in open source AI on two fronts: an acquisition and a new model release.
The semiconductor giant announced Monday it acquired SchedMD, the leading developer of popular open source workload management system Slurm. Nvidia said the company will continue to operate the program, which is designed for high-performance computing and AI, as an open source, vendor-neutral software.
Slurm was originally launched in 2002 and SchedMD was founded in 2010 by the lead Slurm developers Morris Jette and Danny Auble. Auble is the current CEO of SchedMD.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Nvidia declined to comment on the news beyond the company’s blog post.
Nvidia has been working with SchedMD for more than a decade and said in its blog post the technology is critical infrastructure for generative AI. The company plans to keep investing in the technology and “accelerate” its access to different systems.
The semiconductor company also released a new family of open AI models on Monday. The company claimed this group of models, called Nvidia Nemotron 3, is the most “efficient family of open models” for building accurate AI agents.
This model family includes the Nemotron 3 Nano, a small model for targeted tasks, the Nemotron 3 Super, a model built for multi-AI agent applications, and Nemotron 3 Ultra, built for more complicated tasks.
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“Open innovation is the foundation of AI progress,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, wrote in the company’s press release. “With Nemotron, we’re transforming advanced AI into an open platform that gives developers the transparency and efficiency they need to build agentic systems at scale.”
In recent months, Nvidia has pushed to bolster its open source and open AI offerings.
Last week, the company announced a new open reasoning vision language model, Alpamayo-R1, which is focused on autonomous driving research. The company also said at the time it added more workflows and guides covering its Cosmos world models, which are open source under a permissive license, to help developers better use the models to develop physical AI.
The activity is reflective of Nvidia’s bet that physical AI will be the next frontier for its GPUs. Nvidia wants to be the go-to supplier for the many robotics — or self-driving vehicle — companies looking for the AI and software to develop the brains behind the technology.
Becca is a senior writer at TechCrunch that covers venture capital trends and startups. She previously covered the same beat for Forbes and the Venture Capital Journal.
You can contact or verify outreach from Becca by emailing rebecca.szkutak@techcrunch.com.
