Support for `--gpu-driver` to skip GPU driver install

[sarah-wayve]

Is there an existing issue for this?

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Description

From mid-August 2025, AKS won't support the SkipGPUDriverInstall tag anymore for skipping the default installation of the GPU driver.
The alternative will be the "--gpu-driver" API field, available in the az aks command.

azurerm should support this new field to allow users to control the GPU installation and skip the default one.

New or Affected Resource(s)/Data Source(s)

azurerm_kubernetes_cluster_node_pool

Potential Terraform Configuration

install_gpu_driver = true | false

References

No response

[spanktar]

I believe support for this was planned, but the feature was in Preview, so it was shelved:
#25455

This is no longer the case, and they gave a very short window for addressing this. I hope it can be released quickly! 😄

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/gpu-cluster?tabs=add-ubuntu-gpu-node-pool#skip-gpu-driver-installation

From Microsoft:

Upgrade your GPU-enabled node pools by 14 August 2025: Support is ending for the skip-gpu-driver-install node pool tag
You're receiving this notification because you're associated with one or more Azure subscriptions that use Azure Kubernetes Servce (AKS).

We've detected that you're running workloads on one or more GPU-enabled node pools with the skip-gpu-driver-install tag on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Starting on 14 August 2025, the skip-gpu-driver-install node pool tag will no longer be supported on AKS. You won't be able to skip automatic driver installation on new GPU-enabled node pools using the node pool tag.

Required action
Please upgrade your existing Windows and Linux node pools with the skip-gpu-driver-install node pool tag, and set the supported gpu-driver API field at node pool upgrade time to retain the existing behavior.

The gpu-driver API field is the recommended solution for installing custom drivers or using the NVIDIA GPU Operator on AKS. See this AKS documentation for more information.

[vasyl-sw14]

I'm going to create a PR with new "gpu_driver" argument. The PR will be related to the new features of Go SDK (hashicorp/go-azure-sdk#1201).

[karen-wang-ai]

@vasyl-sw14 Thanks for taking this on! Do you have an estimated timeline on when we can get the PR merged? AKS support ends Aug 14th so we'd like to incorporate this update into our current release.

[github-actions]

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