The acquisition comes as Red Hat makes several AI-related announcements at the annual computing conference, KubeCon. The company also unveiled Climatik, a tool developed in collaboration with Intel, Bloomberg, and IBM to optimize data center energy efficiency. The move is part of a broader trend of big tech providers acquiring firms with products that can help optimize AI algorithms.
Key takeaways:
- Red Hat, an IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs.
- Neural Magic, founded in 2018, has a free platform and a collection of open source tools for AI optimization, and has raised $50 million in venture capital from various backers.
- Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks said Neural Magic’s work on vLLM, an open source project for model serving, was of particular interest to Red Hat, and will allow customers to optimize and deploy models across cloud environments.
- The acquisition comes as Red Hat makes a number of AI-related announcements at KubeCon, including the unveiling of Climatik, a tool developed in collaboration with Intel, Bloomberg and IBM to optimize data center energy efficiency.