Nvidia Expands Open Source Offerings with Acquisition of SchedMD and New Open AI Models

Nvidia continues to expand its influence in the open-source AI space with two major moves: the acquisition of SchedMD and the release of new open AI models.

Acquisition of SchedMD
On Monday, Nvidia announced it had acquired SchedMD, the primary developer of the widely used open-source workload management system Slurm. Nvidia stated that the program, which is designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI, will remain open-source and vendor-neutral post-acquisition. Slurm has been a key tool for managing large-scale workloads, especially in the realm of generative AI.

Slurm, initially launched in 2002, has been managed by SchedMD since its foundation in 2010. ScSchedMD's lead developers, Morris Jette and Danny Auble, are central figures in the company, with Auble serving as the CEO. While Nvidia did not disclose the terms of the deal, the company noted its long-standing relationship with SchedMD, which has collaborated with Nvidia for over a decade.

Nvidia has committed to continuing the development of Slurm, noting that it is "critical infrastructure" in the growing field of generative AI. The company plans to enhance its accessibility across systems to ensure widespread adoption.

New Open AI Models: Nvidia Nemotron 3
In addition to the acquisition, Nvidia unveiled its latest family of open AI models: Nvidia Nemotron 3. The company claims this group of models is the most "e" fficient family of open models for building precise AI agents. The new models include:

• Nemotron 3 Nano: A compact model designed for specific, targeted tasks.
• Nemotron 3 Super: A model tailored for multi-agent AI applications.
• Nemotron 3 Ultra: Designed for complex tasks requiring more advanced capabilities.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, highlighted the importance of open innovation in driving AI progress. He stated, "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."

"Expansion in Open Source AI
This announcement follows Nvidia's growing focus on open-source AI. Last week, Nvidia introduced Alpamayo-R1, an open-reasoning vision-language model designed to advance autonomous driving research. The company also expanded its Cosmos world models, which are open-source under a permissive license, to further assist developers in creating physical AI systems.

NVIDIA's continued push into open-source and physical AI underscores its strategy to become the leading supplier of GPUs for robotics and self-driving vehicle technologies. The company believes that physical AI is the next frontier, and its recent activities reflect this growing focus.