NVIDIA H100 driver not loading on Ubuntu 25.x (kernel 6.14) nvidia-smi fails

Accelerated Computing Confidential Computing
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1

Hello NVIDIA team,

I am trying to install and use NVIDIA drivers on a system with an NVIDIA H100 (GH100 PCIe) GPU, but I am unable to get nvidia-smi working.

System details

  • GPU: NVIDIA H100 (GH100 PCIe)

  • OS: Ubuntu 25.x (plucky)

  • Kernel: 6.14.0-37-generic

  • Use case: Basic GPU validation (nvidia-smi), no containers involved at this stage

What I have tried

  • Installed multiple NVIDIA drivers via APT, including:

    • nvidia-driver-535-server

    • nvidia-driver-550

    • nvidia-driver-570-server

    • nvidia-driver-580

  • All drivers install successfully via apt

Observed behavior

After installing any of the above drivers, nvidia-smi consistently fails with:

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver.

Additionally:

lsmod | grep nvidia

shows no NVIDIA kernel modules loaded.

2

Please install open gpu module such as nvidia-driver-550-open