Canonical announces it will support and distribute Nvidia CUDA in Ubuntu (canonical.com)

Canonical announced that the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and runtime will be officially supported and distributed inside Ubuntu’s repositories, letting developers install CUDA natively through APT rather than downloading installers from NVIDIA’s site. CUDA — NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform exposing the GPU’s SIMT (Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread) model — provides the low‑level threading, memory and kernel controls used to accelerate numerical and tensor workloads. Because Canonical and NVIDIA have long tested CUDA on Ubuntu (widely used in data centers), packaging CUDA into the OS promises a smoother, single‑command installation flow and tighter compatibility management across supported NVIDIA hardware. For the AI/ML community this lowers friction for building, testing and deploying GPU-accelerated apps: application developers can simply declare the CUDA runtime as a package dependency while Ubuntu manages installation, versioning and compatibility. Delivering CUDA through trusted Ubuntu repos also leverages Ubuntu’s long-term support cadence, secure supply chain and optional Ubuntu Pro maintenance (extended security updates and systems management), which matters for reproducibility, enterprise stability, and scaled deployments across cloud, edge and on‑prem clusters. Overall, the change should speed iteration and operational reliability for GPU-backed ML workloads.