Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Run:ai, a software company that makes it easier for customers to orchestrate GPU clouds for AI, and said it will open source the software.

The purchase price was not disclosed, but was reportedly $700 million when Nvidia first announced its intention to complete the deal in April. Run:ai posted the deal news on its website today and also announced that Nvidia plans to open source the software. Run:ai’s software remotely schedules Nvidia GPU resources for AI in the cloud.

Neither company has explained why Run:ai will open source its platform, but it’s probably not hard to figure out. Since Nvidia became the leading AI chip maker, its share price has risen to $3.56 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world. That’s great for Nvidia, but it makes it difficult to acquire companies due to antitrust oversight.

An Nvidia spokesperson simply said in a statement: “We are pleased to welcome the Run:ai team to Nvidia.”

When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the company appeased antitrust regulators by licensing Activision’s Call of Duty game to other platforms for a decade to address concerns that the company would become too powerful in the gaming space would. The same thing could happen here.

Run:ai founders Omri Geller and Ronen Dar said in a press release that the open source of their software will help the community develop better AI faster.

“While Run:ai currently only supports Nvidia GPUs, the open-sourcing software will allow it to expand its availability across the entire AI ecosystem,” Geller and Dar said.

They said they will continue to help their customers get the most out of their AI infrastructure and provide the ecosystem with maximum flexibility, efficiency and usage for GPU systems wherever they are: on-premises, in the cloud through native Solutions or on Nvidia DGX Cloud, developed together with leading CSPs.

The founders also said: “True to our open platform philosophy, as part of Nvidia, we will continue to give AI teams the freedom to choose the tools, platforms and frameworks that best meet their needs.” We will continue to strengthen our partnerships and together work with the ecosystem on it
Providing a wide range of AI solutions and platform options.”

The Israel-based company said when it was founded in 2018 that its goal was to be a driving force in AI
Revolutionize and empower companies to realize the full potential of their AI infrastructures.

“Our world-class team has achieved milestones over the years that we could only dream of back then. Together we have developed innovative technology, an amazing product and an incredible go-to-market engine,” said the founders.

Run:ai helps customers orchestrate their AI infrastructure, increase efficiency and utilization, and increase the productivity of their AI teams.

“We are excited to build on this momentum, now as part of Nvidia. AI and accelerated computing are changing the world at an unprecedented pace, and we believe this is just the beginning,” said the founders of Run:ai. “GPUs and AI infrastructure will continue to be at the forefront of driving these transformative innovations, and joining Nvidia provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to continue a shared mission of helping humanity tackle the world’s greatest challenges.”

Nvidia has long been a graphics chip maker, and those chips have become much more useful for running AI software in recent years. Now the company is also focusing on software, and this acquisition aims to provide customers with maximum choice, efficiency and flexibility for GPU orchestration software. Nvidia and Run:ai have been working together since 2020 and have common customers.

TLV Partners led the seed round for Run:ai in 2018. Rona Segev, chief executive of TLV, said in a statement: “The AI ​​market seemed a different world in early 2018. OpenAI was still a research company and Nvidia’s market capitalization was “only” around $100 billion. We met Omri and Ronen, who painted a picture for us of what the future of AI would look like. In their vision of the future, AI was omnipresent.”

Segev added: “Everyone on the planet would interact with AI on a daily basis, and it would be obvious that every company would use AI in one way or another.” The only thing that prevented this vision from becoming a reality, in her opinion, was the lack of it Efficiency and the costs associated with training AI models and running them in production on multiple GPU clusters. To solve this problem, Omri and Ronen proposed the idea of ​​creating an orchestration layer between AI models and GPUs that would enable much more efficient use of the underlying computing resources, resulting in faster training times and significantly lower costs.”

And Segev said: “Of course, it was all theoretical back then, as they hadn’t yet founded a company, let alone a product. We didn’t know much about the industry back then. But Omri and Ronen had something special. They had a unique combination of intellect, charm, whimsy and humility that created the perfect recipe for the type of founders we want to support.”