Nscale is acquiring Anyscale, the commercial company behind the open-source Ray framework, to combine Ray with Kubernetes and Slurm and strengthen its end-to-end AI infrastructure platform.
Nscale has agreed to acquire Anyscale, the commercial company behind the open-source Ray distributed computing framework, in a deal reportedly valued at US$1.65 billion, according to Bloomberg. The acquisition brings one of the most widely used open-source AI workload optimisation frameworks into Nscale’s AI cloud business.
Created by Anyscale’s founding team, Ray is an open-source framework designed to optimise large-scale AI clusters and distributed AI workloads. Nscale plans to integrate Ray with its own infrastructure optimisation software, creating a vertically integrated AI cloud platform that spans infrastructure and workload management.
The company already offers managed versions of Kubernetes and Slurm, two open-source technologies used to automate server cluster management. Adding Ray expands Nscale’s open-source AI infrastructure portfolio and strengthens its managed AI cloud offerings.
Anyscale’s commercial platform enables developers to launch managed Ray clusters in under a minute and includes monitoring dashboards for troubleshooting. Ray also improves AI cluster efficiency by automatically replacing failed servers during training runs, reducing bandwidth costs by placing AI models and datasets on the same machines, and simplifying distributed workload optimisation.
The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year.
“We build and own every layer ourselves: the power, the data centers, the compute, and the software that turns them into an AI cloud,” said Josh Payne, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Nscale. “Anyscale extends that offering with managed services that AI teams use to scale any workload, completing a truly vertically integrated AI cloud platform.”
Nscale is currently developing AI data centres across six countries and raised US$2 billion in March from investors including Nvidia and other technology firms.
