Santa Clara, Dec 17: Nvidia said on Monday it has acquired AI software provider SchedMD, as the chip designer steps up its push into open-source technology and expands investments across the artificial intelligence ecosystem to defend its market dominance amid rising competition.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Nvidia said it will continue to distribute SchedMD’s software on an open-source basis.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has built its reputation on high-performance chips used to train and run AI models, but software has become an increasingly important pillar of its strategy. Nvidia offers a range of open-source AI models — from physics simulations to self-driving systems — while its proprietary CUDA software remains a key standard for developers and a major driver of demand for its chips.
SchedMD provides software that helps schedule and manage large computing jobs that can consume significant portions of a data center’s server capacity. Its core technology, known as Slurm, is open source and widely used in high-performance computing environments. While the software is freely available, SchedMD sells engineering and maintenance support to customers.
“Slurm, which is supported on the latest Nvidia hardware, is also part of the critical infrastructure needed for generative AI, used by foundation model developers and AI builders to manage model training and inference needs,” Nvidia said in a blog post.
Nvidia shares rose about 1.35% following the announcement, which came alongside an earlier unveiling of a new family of open-source AI models that the company said would be faster, cheaper and more capable than its previous offerings. The move comes as Nvidia faces growing competition from rival open-source AI models, including those developed by Chinese AI labs.
SchedMD was founded in 2010 in Livermore, California, by Slurm developers Morris “Moe” Jette and Danny Auble. The company employs about 40 people, according to its website, and counts cloud infrastructure firm CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center among its customers.
