Nvidia Expands Open Source Offerings with Acquisition and New AI Models

Nvidia announced its acquisition of SchedMD, the leading developer of the open-source workload management system Slurm, which is designed for high-performance computing and AI. The deal, details of which were not disclosed, will allow SchedMD to continue operating Slurm as vendor-neutral software.

Nvidia has collaborated with SchedMD for over a decade, emphasizing the technology's importance for generative AI. Concurrently, Nvidia introduced a new family of open AI models called Nvidia Nemotron 3, which includes the Nemotron 3 Nano for targeted tasks, the Nemotron 3 Super for multi-AI agent applications, and the Nemotron 3 Ultra for more complex tasks.

CEO Jensen Huang stated that with Nemotron, Nvidia aims to transform advanced AI into an open platform, providing developers with the transparency and efficiency needed to build scalable agentic systems.

This move follows Nvidia's recent announcement of the open reasoning vision language model, Alpamayo-R1, focused on autonomous driving research, along with enhanced workflows and guides for its Cosmos world models, which are open source under a permissive license.

Nvidia is positioning itself as a key supplier for robotics and self-driving vehicle companies, betting that physical AI will be the next frontier for its GPUs.