Red Hat has announced a definitive agreement to purchase Neural Magic, a company specializing in “maximizing computational efficiency” of open-source AI models.

Neural Magic uses “software and algorithms that accelerate generative AI (gen AI) inference workloads.” Red Hat, and its upstream Fedora, has been working to become a leading development environment for AI technology. As a result, it’s not surprising the company is acquiring a startup specializing in improving the performance of open-source AI models.

Neural Magic’s expertise in inference performance engineering and commitment to open source aligns with Red Hat’s vision of high-performing AI workloads that directly map to customer-specific use cases and data, anywhere and everywhere across the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat emphasizes the need to make generative AI more accessible, especially given the ballooning computing power and energy demands AI models require.

Red Hat intends to address these challenges by making gen AI more accessible to more organizations through the open innovation of vLLM. Developed by UC Berkeley, vLLM is a community-driven open source project for open model serving (how gen AI models infer and solve problems), with support for all key model families, advanced inference acceleration research and diverse hardware backends including AMD GPUs, AWS Neuron, Google TPUs, Intel Gaudi, NVIDIA GPUs and x86 CPUs. Neural Magic’s leadership in the vLLM project combined with Red Hat’s strong portfolio of hybrid cloud AI technologies will offer organizations an open pathway to building AI strategies that meet their unique needs, wherever their data lives.

“AI workloads need to run wherever customer data lives across the hybrid cloud; this makes flexible, standardized and open platforms and tools a necessity, as they enable organizations to select the environments, resources and architectures that best align with their unique operational and data needs,” said Matt Hicks, president and CEO, Red Hat. “We’re thrilled to complement our hybrid cloud-focused AI portfolio with Neural Magic’s groundbreaking AI innovation, furthering our drive to not only be the ‘Red Hat’ of open source, but the ‘Red Hat’ of AI as well.”

“Open source has proven time and again to drive innovation through the power of community collaboration,” added Brian Stevens, CEO, Neural Magic. “At Neural Magic, we’ve assembled some of the industry’s top talent in AI performance engineering with a singular mission of building open, cross-platform, ultra-efficient LLM serving capabilities. Joining Red Hat is not only a cultural match, but will benefit companies large and small in their AI transformation journeys.”