Nvidia Expands AI Cloud Capabilities with Fourth Acquisition This Year

The latest startup to be acquired by Nvidia is Brev.dev, which helps AI developers find the most cost-effective GPU computing across cloud providers. This comes after Nvidia acquired two other startups with the express goal of expanding the capabilities of its DGX Cloud service.

Nvidia has bought a startup that helps AI developers find the most cost-effective GPU computing solutions from cloud providers, making it the AI ​​chip giant’s fourth acquisition this year.

An Nvidia spokesperson confirmed to CRN on Tuesday that the company has acquired Brev.dev, a San Francisco-based startup that provides a software platform for building, training, and deploying models on CPU- and GPU-based cloud instances.

(Related: Analysis: While Nvidia claims victory in AI, AMD doubles down on Intel’s woes)

The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Brev’s goal is to create the easiest way for AI/ML developers to use GPUs,” the startup said in a LinkedIn post this week. “Partnering with Nvidia means we can accomplish that mission by combining the most powerful hardware with industry-leading software.”

As listed on its website, Brev.dev lists Nvidia, Intel, and Amazon Web Services as official partners and says its platform serves as “a single interface between AWS (Google Cloud Platform), Fluidstack, and other GPU clouds.” According to the startup, this allows developers to find instances based on cost and availability.

While Nvidia has been supplying GPUs to cloud service providers for more than a decade, in recent years the company has been trying to grow its business around cloud infrastructure — a hotspot for AI development — by developing a growing portfolio of software and services.

Most notably, the company last year launched DGX Cloud, a service that runs on cloud providers like AWS and gives enterprises quick access to the tools, support, and GPU-based infrastructure they need to build and run generative AI applications. The service starts at $19,699 per month with a one-year commitment for a single A100-based node.

Two of Nvidia’s acquisition deals earlier this year were solely aimed at expanding the capabilities of its DGX Cloud service.

In late April, the company announced it had struck a deal to acquire Israeli AI infrastructure management startup Run:ai. The startup provides Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software that Nvidia says it plans to use to power its DGX Cloud business and expand the capabilities of its DGX and HGX server clients.

According to multiple reports, the Run:ai contract was valued at around $700 million.

Earlier this month, Nvidia acquired Shoreline.io, a Redwood City, Calif.-based startup founded by a former AWS executive that provides software to automatically troubleshoot data center infrastructure issues. The deal was confirmed by the startup, with one of its investors saying that the Shoreline team is joining its DGX Cloud unit. The deal was reportedly valued at about $100 million.

Nvidia’s other acquisition this year was another Israeli startup called Deci, which makes software that can speed up AI model inference while maintaining accuracy on any hardware. The deal was valued at about $300 million.