Red Hat, the IBM-owned open source software firm, is acquiring Neural Magic, a startup that optimizes AI models to run faster on commodity processors and GPUs.

The transaction is subject to applicable regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

MIT research scientist Alex Matveev and professor Nir Shavit founded Somerville, Massachusetts-based Neural Magic in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance execution engines for AI.

Neural Magic’s software aims to process AI workloads on processors and GPUs at speeds equivalent to specialized AI chips (e.g. TPUs). By running models through off-the-shelf processors, which usually have more available memory, the company’s software can realize speedups.

Big tech companies like AMD and a host of other startups, including NeuReality, Deci, CoCoPie, OctoML, and DeepCube, offer some sort of AI optimization software. But Neural Magic is one of the few with a free platform, and a collection of open source tools to complement it.

Prior to the Red Hat acquisition, Neural Magic managed to raise $50 million in venture capital from backers like Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associations, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC, and Ridgeline Ventures.

Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks says that Neural Magic’s work on vLLM, an open source project for model serving, was of particular interest to Red Hat. With Neural Magic, Red Hat’s benefitting from a vLLM-based “enterprise-grade” stack that allows customers to optimize and deploy models across cloud environments, Hick says, with full control over infrastructure and security.

Red Hat is already involved in the vLLM project, which it leverages to run models in products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI. Through the combined work of Red Hat and Neural Magic, Red Hat’s infrastructure partners will be able to better scale AI across platforms, Hicks says, while its integrated service provider partners will gain more robust inference and performance to integrate with their offerings.

“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,” Hicks said in a statement. “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.”

Red Hat’s acquisition of Neural Magic comes as the company makes a number of AI-related announcements at KubeCon, the annual computing conference, in Salt Lake City this week.