Nvidia is significantly expanding its commitment to open source artificial intelligence, marked by a strategic acquisition and the introduction of a new family of AI models.

Nvidia Acquires SchedMD, Developer of Slurm

On Monday, the semiconductor giant announced its acquisition of SchedMD, the primary developer behind Slurm, a widely used open-source workload management system crucial for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. Nvidia confirmed that Slurm will continue to operate as an open-source, vendor-neutral software.

Slurm, initially launched in 2002, led to the founding of SchedMD in 2010 by its principal developers, Morris Jette and Danny Auble, with Auble currently serving as CEO.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and Nvidia offered no further comment beyond its official blog post.

Nvidia has collaborated with SchedMD for over a decade, stating in its blog that Slurm's technology is vital infrastructure for generative AI. The company intends to continue investing in Slurm and accelerate its integration across various systems.

Introducing the Nemotron 3 Open AI Models

Also on Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Nemotron 3 family of open AI models. The company touts these models as the most efficient open models available for developing highly accurate AI agents.

The Nemotron 3 lineup includes:

  • Nemotron 3 Nano: A compact model designed for targeted tasks.
  • Nemotron 3 Super: Optimized for multi-AI agent applications.
  • Nemotron 3 Ultra: Tailored for more complex operations.

Open innovation is the foundation of AI progress. 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.

— Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of Nvidia

Nvidia's Broader Open Source AI Strategy

These latest moves underscore Nvidia's aggressive push in recent months to bolster its open-source and open AI initiatives. Just last week, the company introduced Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision language model specifically for autonomous driving research. Additionally, Nvidia expanded its resources for Cosmos world models, which are open source under a permissive license, providing developers with more workflows and guides to facilitate physical AI development.

This strategic activity reflects Nvidia's strong belief that physical AI represents the next major frontier for its powerful GPUs. The company aims to position itself as the leading supplier of AI and software solutions for the burgeoning robotics and autonomous vehicle industries.