Nvidia Corp.'s (NASDAQ:NVDA) acquisition of AI software firm SchedMD is being seen by industry analysts as a strategic move that further entrenches the chipmaker's dominance across the AI software and infrastructure stack.
Nvidia Expands Beyond Chips To Strengthen Its AI Software Ecosystem
On Monday, Nvidia announced that it has acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, an open-source workload manager widely used to schedule and manage large-scale computing jobs across data centers, supercomputers and AI research labs.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Nvidia said it will continue distributing SchedMD's software as open source, reinforcing its stated commitment to the open-source AI community.
SchedMD, founded in 2010 in Livermore, California, develops Slurm, a scheduling system used by leading AI developers and enterprises to manage training and inference workloads.
The company employs about 40 people and counts customers such as cloud infrastructure provider CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
Futurum CEO Says Nvidia Is Deepening The CUDA Moat
Reacting to the announcement, Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman said the acquisition strengthens Nvidia's already formidable software advantage.
"Nvidia just deepened the CUDA moat," Newman said in a post on X. "Not an easy thing to do given the moat is already eight feet deep."
CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, is Nvidia's proprietary parallel computing platform. It has long been a cornerstone of its AI leadership, tightly binding developers to its hardware.
By bringing Slurm closer into its ecosystem, Nvidia extends its influence beyond chips and developer tools into the infrastructure layer that orchestrates how AI workloads run at scale.
Why Slurm Matters In The AI Race
Slurm plays a critical role in allocating computing resources efficiently across clusters of GPUs — a function that has become essential as AI models grow larger and more resource-intensive.
In a blog post announcing the deal, Nvidia said Slurm, optimized to support its latest hardware, has become a key component of generative AI infrastructure used by foundational model developers and AI builders.
The acquisition comes as Nvidia faces intensifying competition, including a surge in open-source AI models from Chinese research labs. Earlier Monday, Nvidia also released a new series of open-source AI models, which it says offer improved speed, efficiency and intelligence.
Nvidia ranks in the 97th percentile for growth among stocks tracked by Benzinga Edge Rankings, outpacing competitors such as AMD and Intel and placing it near the top of its peer group.
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