Transaction reinforces Red Hat's commitment to enabling customized, secure, and scalable artificial intelligence for a variety of organizations
On Wednesday (13), Red Hat completed the acquisition process to acquire Neural Magic, a North American company, pioneer in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) software and algorithms. Neural Magic’s expertise in performance engineering, together with its commitment to open source, aligns with Red Hat’s vision for delivering high-performance AI that fits different scenarios and customer use cases, anywhere in the hybrid cloud.
While the promise of GenAI dominates much of today’s technology landscape, the large language models (LLMs) that underpin these systems continue to grow. As a result, building reliable and cost-effective LLM services requires significant computing power, energy resources, and specialized operational skills. These obstacles currently make the benefits of personalized, deployment-ready, and safer AI unfeasible for most organizations.
With the acquisition of Neural Magic, Red Hat aims to address these challenges by making GenAI 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 GenAI models infer and solve problems), with support for all major model families, advanced inference acceleration research, and a variety of 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 provide organizations with an open path to building AI strategies that meet their unique needs, wherever their data resides.
For Matt Hicks, President and CEO of the company, the acquisition of Neural Magic, together with the development of the vLLM initiative, are the first step in establishing the company as a reference in artificial intelligence. “We are excited to complement our hybrid cloud-focused AI portfolio with Neural Magic’s breakthrough AI innovation, furthering our desire to be not just the ‘Red Hat of open source,’ but also the ‘Red Hat of AI,’” he said.
Red Hat + Neural Magic: Enabling a Hybrid Cloud-Ready Gen AI Future
Neural Magic was spun out of MIT in 2018 with the goal of building high-performance inference software for deep learning. With Neural Magic’s technology and performance engineering expertise, Red Hat is accelerating its vision for the future of AI, powered by Red Hat’s AI technology portfolio. Built to solve the challenges of enterprise AI at scale, the company uses open source innovation to further democratize access to the transformative power of AI through:
- Open source licensed models at scale from 1B to 405B parameters that can operate anywhere in the hybrid cloud—in enterprise data centers, across multiple clouds, and at the edge.
- Tuning capabilities that allow organizations to more easily customize LLMs with their private data and use cases with a more robust security framework.
- Expertise in inference performance engineering, resulting in greater operational and infrastructure efficiencies
- An open source ecosystem of partners and support structures that enable customers to have more choice, from LLMs and tools to certified server hardware and chip architectures.
vLLM Leadership to Advance Red Hat AI
Neural Magic will leverage its vLLM expertise and knowledge to build an enterprise-grade technology foundation that enables customers to optimize, deploy, and scale LLM workloads across hybrid cloud environments with full control over infrastructure choice, security policies, and model lifecycle. Neural Magic also conducts model optimization research, builds the LLM Compressor (a unified library for optimizing LLMs with state-of-the-art sparsity and quantization algorithms), and maintains a repository of pre-optimized models ready to be deployed with vLLM.
Red Hat AI aims to help customers reduce AI costs and skills barriers with powerful technologies such as:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a platform for foundational models to seamlessly develop, test, and operate the IBM Granite family of open source LLMs for enterprise applications on Linux server deployments;
- Red Hat OpenShift AI, an AI platform that provides tools to rapidly develop, train, serve, and monitor machine learning models in distributed Kubernetes environments on-premises, in the public cloud, or at the edge;
- InstructLab, an open source community project created by Red Hat and IBM that enables anyone to shape the future of GenAI through collaborative enhancement of open source Granite LLMs using fine-tuning technology from InstructLab.
Neural Magic’s technology leadership in vLLM will enhance Red Hat AI’s ability to support LLM deployments in any environment and anywhere across the hybrid cloud with a ready-made, highly optimized, and open inference stack.
The transaction must still undergo US regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.
About Red Hat
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, with a community-driven approach to delivering highly reliable, high-performance technologies such as Linux, hybrid cloud, containers, and Kubernetes. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, deliver cloud-native development, standardize and automate the industry’s leading operating system, and secure and manage complex environments. Renowned support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat the trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies. As a strategic partner to cloud and application providers, system integrators, customers, and the open source community, Red Hat helps organizations prepare for the digital future.
