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Nvidia has completed the acquisition of Run:aia software company that makes it easier for customers to orchestrate GPU clouds for AI, and said it would make the software open source.
The purchase price was not disclosed, but was valued at $700 million. when Nvidia first announced plans to close the deal in April. Run:ai posted news of the deal on its website today and also said that Nvidia plans to open source the software. Run:ai software remotely schedules Nvidia GPU resources for AI in the cloud.
Neither company has explained why Run:ai would open source its platform, but it’s probably not hard to understand. Since Nvidia became the leading AI chip maker, its stock price has soared 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 scrutiny.
An Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement: “We are excited to welcome the Run:ai team to Nvidia.”
When Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, it appeased antitrust regulators by licensing Activision’s Call of Duty game to other platforms for a decade to address concerns that the company become too powerful in the gaming field. The same thing could happen here.
Run:ai founders Omri Geller and Ronen Dar said in a press release that open sourcing its software would help the community create better AI, faster.
“While Run:ai currently only supports Nvidia GPUs, open sourcing the 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 utilization for GPU systems, wherever they are located: on-premises, in the cloud via native solutions or on Nvidia. DGX Cloud, co-designed 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 work alongside the ecosystem to
offering a wide variety of AI solutions and platform choices.
The Israel-based company said its goal when it was founded in 2018 was to be a leading force in the field of AI.
revolutionize and enable organizations to unlock the full potential of their AI infrastructures.
“Over the years, our world-class team has achieved milestones that we could only dream of at the time. Together we have built an innovative technology, an amazing product and an incredible commercialization 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 continue this momentum, now within Nvidia. AI and accelerated computing are transforming the world at an unprecedented pace, and we believe this is only the beginning,” said Run:ai founders. “GPUs and AI infrastructure will continue to be at the forefront of these transformative innovations and joining Nvidia provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to pursue a shared mission of helping humanity solve the world’s greatest challenges.” »
Nvidia is a longtime maker of graphics chips, and these chips have become much more useful in recent years for running AI software. Now the company is also focusing on software, and this acquisition aims to provide customers with maximum choice, efficiency and flexibility in GPU orchestration software. Nvidia and Run:ai have been working together since 2020 and have common customers.
TLV Partners led Run:ai’s seed round in 2018. Rona Segev, Managing Director of TLV, said in a statement: “The AI market at the start of 2018 seemed like a different world. OpenAI was still a research company and Nvidia’s market cap was “only” around $100 billion. We sat down with Omri and Ronen who painted us a picture 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 business would benefit from AI in one way or another. The only thing preventing this vision from becoming a reality, they said, was the lack of efficiency and [the] the costs associated with training AI models and running them in production on multiple GPU clusters. To solve this problem, Omri and Ronen floated the idea of creating an orchestration layer between AI models and GPUs that would enable much more efficient use of the underlying compute resources, leading to faster training times. faster and with a significant reduction in costs.
And Segev said: “Of course, this was all theoretical at the time because they hadn’t yet built a company, let alone a product. At the time, we didn’t know much about the industry. But there was something special about Omri and Ronen. They had a unique combination of intellect, charm, craziness and humility that created the perfect recipe for the type of founders we seek to support.
