Nvidia is increasing its open source offerings with an acquisition and new open AI models

Nvidia continues to expand its footprint in open source AI on two fronts: acquisition and release of a new model.

The semiconductor giant announced Monday that it has acquired SchedMD, the leading developer of the popular open source workload management system Slurm. Nvidia said the company will continue to operate the software, designed for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, as open source and vendor-neutral.

Slurm was originally launched in 2002 and SchedMD was founded in 2010 by Slurm lead developers Morris Jette and Danny Auble. Auble is the current CEO of SchedMD.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Nvidia declined to comment on the news outside of the company’s blog post.

Nvidia has been working with SchedMD for more than a decade and said in its blog post that the technology represents important infrastructure for generative AI. The company plans to continue investing in the technology and “accelerate” its access to various systems.

The semiconductor company also released a new family of open AI models on Monday. The company claimed that this family of models, called Nvidia Nemotron 3, is the “most efficient open model family” for building micro-AI agents.

This model family includes the Nemotron 3 Nano, a small model for targeted tasks, the Nemotron 3 Super, a model designed for multiple AI client applications, and the Nemotron 3 Ultra, designed for more complex tasks.

“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 are turning advanced AI into an open platform that gives developers the transparency and efficiency they need to build agent systems at scale.”

In recent months, Nvidia has sought to bolster its open source and open AI offerings.

Last week, the company announced a new open logic vision language prototype, Alpamayo-R1, which is focused on autonomous driving research. The company also said at the time that it had 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.

This activity reflects Nvidia’s bet that physical AI will be the next frontier for its GPUs. Nvidia wants to be the supplier of choice for many robotics — or self-driving vehicle — companies looking for artificial intelligence and software to develop the minds behind the technology.