Nvidia is going shopping again. The artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant announced Monday that it has acquired SchedMD, developer of the open source workload management system Slurm. The firm led by Jensen Huang did not disclose the financial terms of the transaction.
The announcement coincided with the rebound of Nvidia shares, after the declines suffered in recent days, given the uncertainty generated around a possible bubble in the field of AI, which caused a strong sanction for companies like Oracle, Broadcom and SoftBank. The stock increased by more than 1.5% mid-session, returning to the $178 level. Nvidia remains the world’s largest company by market capitalization, with a market value of $4.32 trillion.
The company explained that it will continue to develop and distribute Slurm as open source and vendor-neutral software. Additionally, Nvidia said it will accelerate SchedMD’s access to new systems, while supporting a diverse hardware and software ecosystem.
According to Nvidia, HPC and AI workloads involve complex computations that run parallel tasks across clusters that require queuing, scheduling, and allocation of compute resources. As HPC and AI clusters become larger and more powerful, efficient resource utilization is crucial.
Additionally, the giant says that as a workload manager and task scheduler in terms of scalability, performance and complex policy management, Slurm is used in more than half of the top 10 and top 100 systems in the TOP500 list of supercomputers. Supported by the latest Nvidia hardware, Slurm is also part of the critical infrastructure needed for generative AI, used by core model developers and AI developers to manage model training and inference needs.
In general, Nvidia has maintained intense investment activity in recent months, with significant operations such as the $100 billion investment in OpenAI, or entry into companies like Intel and Nokia.
In addition, Nvidia joined the consortium led by BlackRock for the acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, the largest in the history of data centers, valued at $40 billion; participated, with Microsoft, in a 15 billion investment in Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI; and committed an injection of 2 billion into Synopsys, a supplier of software for the design of semiconductors. She also participated in the table rounds of start-up like xAI, led by Elon Musk; Nscale, developer of data centers for AI; Laboratory of thinking machines; Scale AI, or Perplexity.
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