Following Canonical announcing plans to better support NVIDIA CUDA on Ubuntu Linux and make it easier to install as well as SUSE better supporting CUDA along similar lines, Red Hat today affirmed their plans to do the same. Red Hat will be making it easier to use the NVIDIA CUDA stack across RHEL, Red Hat AI, and OpenShift products.
Red Hat will be distributing the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit directly within their platforms to streamline the developer experience, provide operational consistency to customers, and make it easier to leverage Red Hat platforms with the latest NVIDIA hardware and software innovations.
Red Hat’s Ryan King remarked in today’s announcement:
“For decades, Red Hat has been focused on providing the foundation for enterprise technology — a flexible, more consistent, and open platform. Today, as AI moves from a science experiment to a core business driver, that mission is more critical than ever. The challenge isn’t just about building AI models and AI-enabled applications; it’s about making sure the underlying infrastructure is ready to support them at scale, from the datacenter to the edge.
This is why I’m so enthusiastic about the collaboration between Red Hat and NVIDIA. We’ve long worked together to bring our technologies to the open hybrid cloud, and our new agreement to distribute the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit across the Red Hat portfolio is a testament to that collaboration. This isn’t just another collaboration; it’s about making it simpler for you to innovate with AI, no matter where you are on your journey.”
And for those concerned about the “walled garden” of NVIDIA’s CUDA with its proprietary user-space software components, King added in the Red Hat announcement:
“This collaboration with NVIDIA is also an example of Red Hat’s open source philosophy in action. We’re not building a walled garden. Instead, we’re building a bridge between two of the most important ecosystems in the enterprise: the open hybrid cloud and the leading AI hardware and software platform. Our role is to provide a more stable and reliable platform that lets you choose the best tools for the job, all with an enhanced security posture.
The future of AI is not about a single model, a single accelerator, or a single cloud. It’s about a heterogeneous mix of technologies working together to solve real-world problems. By integrating the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit directly with our platforms, we’re making it easier for you to build that future.”
Those interested can read today’s announcement on RedHat.com.
