Nvidia Expands Its Open-Source AI Strategy With New Acquisition and Models

Nvidia Doubles Down on Open-Source AI Strategy

Nvidia is strengthening its position in open-source artificial intelligence through both an acquisition and the release of new AI models.

The semiconductor giant announced that it has acquired SchedMD, the company behind Slurm, one of the world’s most widely used open-source workload management systems. Slurm is commonly used in high-performance computing (HPC) and AI research to manage and schedule computing tasks across large systems.

Importantly, Nvidia confirmed that Slurm will remain open source and vendor-neutral, continuing to serve researchers and organizations across the tech industry. Slurm was originally launched in 2002, and SchedMD was founded in 2010 by its lead developers, Morris Jette and Danny Auble. Auble remains the company’s CEO. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Nvidia has collaborated with SchedMD for more than a decade and describes Slurm as critical infrastructure for generative AI. The company says it will continue investing in the technology to improve access across different computing environments.

Alongside the acquisition, Nvidia also introduced a new family of open AI models called Nvidia Nemotron 3. According to the company, Nemotron 3 is designed to be one of the most efficient open model families for building accurate AI agents.

The release includes:

Nemotron 3 Nano – a lightweight model for focused tasks
Nemotron 3 Super – built for multi-AI-agent systems
Nemotron 3 Ultra – designed for more complex and demanding workloads

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the company’s commitment to openness, stating that “open innovation is the foundation of AI progress,” and that Nemotron aims to give developers the transparency and efficiency needed to build advanced AI systems at scale.

This move follows several recent open-AI initiatives from Nvidia. Just last week, the company released Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision-language model aimed at autonomous driving research. Nvidia has also expanded documentation and workflows for its Cosmos world models, which are open source and designed to support the development of physical AI systems.

Together, these efforts highlight Nvidia’s growing focus on physical AI technology that powers robotics, self-driving vehicles, and intelligent machines. As demand increases, Nvidia aims to position its GPUs, software, and open models as the foundation behind the next generation of AI-powered systems.