GPU maker Nvidia is reportedly in advanced negotiations to buy AI infrastructure orchestration and management platform Run:ai in a deal that could be worth up to $1 billion.
Talks are apparently ongoing between the tech giant and the Israeli startup. The acquisition will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and could reach the $1 billion mark according to Calcalist, which first reported the news.
Run:ai has built an orchestration and virtualization platform designed for AI workloads running on GPUs and other accelerators. It provides a software layer that pools and shares GPU resources, assigning the required amount of compute power to individual tasks as appropriate. This can involve either a fraction of a single GPU, multiple chips, or multiple nodes of GPUs.
The company was founded in 2018 by Omri Geller and Ronen Dar, and raised $75 million in a Series-C funding round in March 2022.
It already has a relationship with Nvidia, and yesterday announced its software had been certified to run on the company's DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputing architecture.
Of the certification, Geller said: "Scaling AI applications and making AI technology more accessible are critical challenges that the industry faces today.
"Our workload management platform, the first to receive certification on Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, marks a significant leap forward in helping address these challenges. This will not just enhance the efficiency and scalability of AI workloads but also open up new opportunities for innovation across the board."
Nvidia has built the technology that has underpinned the AI revolution of the last 18 months, with its GPUs used to train most of the world’s biggest AI models. Last month it reported 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.
This week the company is hosting its GTC developer conference, and has announced a string of new products aimed at increasing its dominance of the AI stack, including a new GPU, Blackwell.
DCD has contacted Nvidia and Run:ai for comment on the report.