New Delhi, India, December 16, 2025 – Nvidia has acquired SchedMD, the company behind the widely used Slurm workload manager, as part of its strategy to expand its open-source AI offerings and maintain leadership in the fast-growing artificial intelligence market. The deal, announced on Monday, underscores Nvidia’s commitment to supporting open-source tools that power high-performance computing and AI development worldwide.
The chipmaker, best known for its powerful graphics processors, has increasingly focused on software to complement its hardware. Its CUDA platform has long been a cornerstone for developers building AI applications. By adding SchedMD to its portfolio, Nvidia aims to make large-scale computing more efficient and accessible for researchers and businesses.
SchedMD’s flagship product, Slurm, is an open-source scheduler that efficiently manages complex computing jobs across data centers and supercomputers. Moreover, it is widely used in scientific research as well as AI model training, including by organizations that operate some of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Importantly, Nvidia confirmed that Slurm will remain open-source and hardware-neutral, therefore ensuring its continued availability for the global developer community.
“Slurm is critical infrastructure for generative AI and large-scale model training,” Nvidia said in a blog post. “We will keep supporting Slurm as open-source software while enhancing its capabilities for next-generation AI workloads.”
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Nevertheless, Nvidia emphasized that the move is part of a broader effort to strengthen its software ecosystem and, at the same time, counter growing competition from rival AI platforms. In addition, the company also introduced a new family of open-source AI models earlier in the day, promising not only faster but also more cost-effective performance compared to previous versions.
Founded in 2010, SchedMD has ~40 employees and serves clients like CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Its technology helps organizations schedule and optimize computing resources for demanding tasks like AI training and simulations.
Industry analysts view the acquisition as a strategic step for Nvidia. Integrating trusted open-source tools like Slurm with Nvidia hardware and software can simplify AI deployment for research and enterprise. This approach also reinforces Nvidia’s position as a leader in both hardware and software for AI.
The timing of the deal is significant. Competition in the AI space is intensifying, with new open-source models emerging from global tech firms and research labs. By investing in infrastructure like Slurm, Nvidia signals it will support the entire AI development pipeline, from hardware to scheduling.
Nvidia shares rose slightly after the announcement, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s strategy. Analysts expect the acquisition to help Nvidia maintain its dominance in AI computing while fostering innovation in open-source communities.
Nvidia will continue distributing SchedMD’s technology freely and provide engineering and maintenance support. This ensures that developers and organizations can keep using Slurm without disruption while benefiting from Nvidia’s resources and expertise.
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, reliable and scalable computing infrastructure is becoming more important than ever. Nvidia’s acquisition of SchedMD highlights the growing role of open-source software in enabling that infrastructure. By pairing its hardware leadership with tools like Slurm, Nvidia aims to meet the demands of next-generation AI applications.
About the Author
