FAQ: Red Hat to acquire Neural Magic

FAQ: Red Hat to acquire Neural Magic

What is being announced?

On Nov. 12, 2024, Red Hat announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, subject to regulatory reviews and other customary closing conditions.

What is Neural Magic?

Neural Magic is a Somerville, Massachusetts-based early stage company developing technology that helps organizations optimize AI models for greater performance and efficiency. Specifically, Neural Magic is a leader in the vLLM community project with expertise in quantization and sparsification.

What does Neural Magic provide?

Neural Magic provides a software-delivered solution designed to optimize AI models and accelerate inference serving, enabling them to run more efficiently. Its core offering revolves around the model runtime vLLM, a popular open source library designed for high throughput and memory-efficient inference and serving for running open source large language models (LLMs). vLLM is the default runtime used in Red Hat OpenShift AI. Neural Magic is a leading contributor to vLLM and brings extensive knowledge and experience with the technology to Red Hat.

Why is Red Hat acquiring Neural Magic?

Red Hat unified the world around enterprise Linux and enterprise Kubernetes. We’re doing the same with AI, actively building the future of AI with open source innovation. Joining forces with Neural Magic enables us to greatly accelerate our efforts toward our goal of making AI accessible to any enterprise.

This transaction underscores our commitment to deliver any application or workload anywhere across the hybrid cloud, from on-premises to public clouds to the edge. Neural Magic’s deep expertise in serving scalable AI models in a more efficient manner aligns with Red Hat’s vision to enable high-performing AI workloads that directly map to customer-specific use cases and data, anywhere and everywhere across the hybrid cloud.

Neural Magic shares our vision for empowering organizations of all sizes to harness the power of AI; its technology, as part of vLLM, can immediately augment and extend the Red Hat AI technology portfolio; and its team of highly skilled, innovative, and passionate people are a great fit for Red Hat.

How does Neural Magic’s technology complement Red Hat’s offerings?

Neural Magic’s technology augments the Red Hat AI technology portfolio and enables us to extend more efficient, hybrid cloud-ready gen AI. Red Hat is already involved in the upstream vLLM community, and leverages the technology for model inferencing in Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) and Red Hat OpenShift AI. Coming together through this acquisition will help us drive greater scale for these efforts.

What is Red Hat’s plan with regard to Neural Magic’s current technology?

Red Hat uses vLLM as the default runtime for inference in RHEL AI and OpenShift AI. Driving innovation into the vLLM community to allow for more scalable and efficient inference across multiple accelerators and hardware footprints is a core goal of Red Hat, Neural Magic, and the vLLM community.

Is Neural Magic’s technology open source? (If not, will Red Hat open source Neural Magic’s technology?)

Neural Magic’s core offering is based around the vLLM open source technology, with additional proprietary code. Red Hat has long shown its commitment to open-sourcing the technology it acquires, and we have no reason to expect a change in this approach. Our specific plans and timeline will be determined over the coming months.

How will the acquisition benefit Red Hat’s partners?

This is a strategic move for Red Hat, but not one that is new to us. From the early days of Linux, to containers, Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenStack, Java, KVM and others, we have been at the forefront of open source innovation and leadership, and have relied on our ecosystem of partners to help us drive this innovation and transformation throughout the industry. Today, we are announcing our commitment to vLLM, and much like we've seen in the past, believe this will be a defining moment for the future of open source AI.

We are enabling a future of hybrid cloud-ready gen AI that will deliver new value to partners and greatly increase their abilities with Red Hat's hybrid AI platform. Red Hat, and our customers, rely on this ecosystem of innovation every day.

With Red Hat and Neural Magic, infrastructure partners powering general computing and AI will be able to better scale AI across platforms and accelerators; ISV partners creating valuable solutions to help meet the unique business challenges of today will gain more robust inference and performance to integrate with their offerings; and OEM partners will be able to take advantage of improved open source infrastructure for gen AI.

Where can I get more information about this news?

• Press release: Red Hat Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Neural Magic
• Blog: AI: Red Hat's vision for an open source future