Nvidia has entered into an agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider.
The terms of the acquisition have not been shared, though reports in March suggested it could reach the value of up to $1 billion.
Artificial intelligence (AI) deployments can be complex and widely distributed across the cloud, the Edge, and on-prem, making orchestrating them efficiently challenging.
Israeli startup Run:ai helps to manage and optimize distributed AI deployments via its open platform built on Kubernetes. The solution supports the major Kubernetes variants, integrates with third-party AI tools, and can handle even data center-scale GPU clusters.
The platform can pool GPUs and share computing power for separate tasks via a centralized interface for managing the infrastructure.
“Run:ai has been a close collaborator with Nvidia since 2020 and we share a passion for helping our customers make the most of their infrastructure,” said Omri Geller, Run:ai cofounder and CEO. “We’re thrilled to join Nvidia and look forward to continuing our journey together.”
Nvidia will continue to offer Run:ai's products,which are already integrated with its Nvidia DGX, Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, Nvidia Base Command, NGC containers and Nvidia AI Enterprise software. The GPU firm will also invest in Run:ai's product roadmap as part of the Nvidia DGX Cloud AI platform.
Run:ai was founded in 2018 by Geller and Ronen Dar, and raised $75 million in a Series-C funding round in March 2022.
Nvidia has been key to the AI boom of the last couple of years, creating the chips that underpin many of the most popular AI models, including its A100, H100, GH200 GPUs. In light of this, the company's revenue has skyrocketed. In February the company reported a quarterly revenue up 256 percent year-on-year, to $22.1 billion, with income from its data center business of $18.4 billion, up 409 percent.
Last month, Nvidia revealed its newest GPU family, dubbed Blackwell. The new GPU architecture will allow customers to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor, the Hopper series.
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, and OpenAI are among the companies that confirmed they will deploy Blackwell GPUs later this year.
