SANTA CLARA, Dec 17 – Nvidia is expanding its presence in open source artificial intelligence through a combination of strategic acquisition and new model releases, reinforcing its push to shape the future of AI infrastructure.
The semiconductor company announced on Monday that it has acquired SchedMD, the developer behind Slurm, one of the world’s most widely used open source workload management systems for high performance computing and artificial intelligence. Nvidia said Slurm will continue to operate as an open source, vendor neutral platform.
Founded in 2010 by Slurm’s lead developers Morris Jette and Danny Auble, SchedMD has played a central role in the evolution of Slurm since its initial launch in 2002. Auble currently serves as the company’s chief executive. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Nvidia said it has collaborated with SchedMD for more than a decade and considers Slurm critical infrastructure for generative AI workloads. The company plans to continue investing in the technology and expand its accessibility across diverse computing systems.
Alongside the acquisition, Nvidia also introduced a new family of open AI models called Nvidia Nemotron 3, which it described as its most efficient open model lineup for developing accurate and scalable AI agents.
The model family includes Nemotron 3 Nano, designed for lightweight and targeted tasks, Nemotron 3 Super, built for multi agent AI applications, and Nemotron 3 Ultra, aimed at handling more complex and demanding workloads.
“Open innovation is the foundation of AI progress,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. He added that Nemotron is intended to transform advanced AI into an open platform that offers developers greater transparency and efficiency when building agentic systems at scale.
The latest announcements follow a broader push by Nvidia to deepen its involvement in open AI. Last week, the company unveiled Alpamayo R1, an open reasoning vision language model focused on autonomous driving research. Nvidia also expanded developer workflows and documentation for its Cosmos world models, which are released under a permissive open source license to support physical AI development.
The moves highlight Nvidia’s belief that physical AI, including robotics and autonomous vehicles, represents the next major growth frontier for its graphics processing units. By pairing hardware leadership with open software and models, Nvidia aims to position itself as a core supplier for companies building the intelligence behind next generation machines.
