Nvidia is expanding its open source AI initiatives through both an acquisition and a new model release. The semiconductor giant announced the acquisition of SchedMD, the primary developer of the popular open source workload management system Slurm. Nvidia stated that Slurm, designed for high-performance computing and AI, will continue to operate as vendor-neutral, open source software. Originally launched in 2002, SchedMD was founded in 2010 by lead Slurm developers Morris Jette and Danny Auble, who serves as the current CEO. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Nvidia has collaborated with SchedMD for over a decade and described Slurm as critical infrastructure for generative AI. The company plans to continue investing in the technology and accelerate its accessibility across different systems.
In a separate announcement, Nvidia released a new family of open AI models called Nemotron 3. The company claims this is the most efficient family of open models for building accurate AI agents. The family includes three variants: Nemotron 3 Nano for targeted tasks, Nemotron 3 Super for multi-AI agent applications, and Nemotron 3 Ultra for more complex tasks.
Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, emphasized the importance of open innovation for AI progress, stating that Nemotron transforms advanced AI into an open platform for developers to build agentic systems at scale.
This activity is part of a broader push by Nvidia to strengthen its open source and open AI offerings. Recently, the company announced Alpamayo-R1, an open reasoning vision language model focused on autonomous driving research. It also added new workflows and guides for its open source Cosmos world models to assist developers in building physical AI.
These moves reflect Nvidia’s strategic bet that physical AI represents the next frontier for its technology. The company aims to be the leading supplier of AI and software for robotics and self-driving vehicle companies developing the intelligence behind their systems.