Red Hat, one of the world’s leading providers of open source solutions, has announced a major expansion of its collaboration with NVIDIA aimed at aligning enterprise open source technologies with the rapid advancement of AI in companies and breakthroughs in rack-scale AI. At a time when the industry is moving away from single-server approaches toward unified high-density systems, Red Hat intends to serve as the starting point for this transition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA, a specialized edition of its enterprise Linux platform optimized for the NVIDIA Rubin platform and tailored to drive future deployment in Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI.
“NVIDIA’s architectural advancements have made AI a must-have, demonstrating that the compute stack will define the industry’s future,” said Matt Hicks, President and CEO of Red Hat. “To address these significant shifts from the outset, Red Hat and NVIDIA aim to offer Day 0 support for NVIDIA’s latest architectures across all of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and AI portfolios. Together, we’re powering the next generation of enterprise AI through the strength of open source.”
For his part, Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, highlighted: “Red Hat revolutionized enterprise computing with high-performance open source software. In the AI era, the entire compute stack—ranging from chips and systems to middleware, models, and the AI lifecycle—is being reinvented from scratch. Together, NVIDIA and Red Hat are industrializing open source to bring AI to the enterprise, starting with the Vera Rubin platform.”
Looking ahead to 2026, many organizations are preparing to move from AI experimentation to production, relying on hierarchical strategies and centralized tools that incorporate AI agents and other breakthroughs. However, this evolution demands a stable, high-performance infrastructure with a more robust security focus, from the baseline architecture to the software that runs on it. In this landscape, the NVIDIA Rubin platform, along with the new NVIDIA Vera CPU and NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, presents itself as a foundation designed for a significant leap in capabilities related to agentic AI and advanced reasoning.
By optimizing their hybrid cloud portfolio to leverage these advances—starting with Day 0 support for the new platform—Red Hat aims to strengthen organizations’ ability to scale their AI initiatives with greater confidence, maintaining enterprise-level reliability and a consistent operational model across hybrid cloud environments.
The foundation for giga-scale AI factories
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform introduces transformative innovations, including the Vera CPU, the most energy-efficient CPU for giga-scale AI factories, the BlueField-4 data processor, and the rack-scale NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 solution. Red Hat announces its intent to provide Day 0 support for the NVIDIA Rubin platform across the entire Red Hat AI portfolio, including:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Acts as a bridge between this advanced hardware and the complex software ecosystems required for modern AI. As a core element of Red Hat’s robust hybrid cloud solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will enable support for NVIDIA Confidential Computing throughout the AI lifecycle, providing enhanced security resources for GPUs, memory, and model data, plus cryptographic proof to organizations that their most sensitive AI workloads are fully protected.
- Red Hat OpenShift: Provides NVIDIA Rubin platform users immediate access to the industry-leading enterprise hybrid cloud platform based on Kubernetes. To automate deployment, configuration, and lifecycle management of accelerated computing, Red Hat OpenShift adds support for NVIDIA infrastructure software and NVIDIA CUDA X libraries, delivering optimized performance for a wide range of accelerated workloads. Support for NVIDIA BlueField also enhances networking, enables advanced cluster management, and improves resource utilization through a more consistent enterprise operational experience.
- Red Hat AI: Red Hat’s production-ready enterprise AI platform will include new integrations with NVIDIA, expanding support for distributed inference with NVIDIA’s open models in Red Hat AI Inference Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, and Red Hat OpenShift AI. This includes joint Red Hat and NVIDIA efforts to extend support beyond the NVIDIA Nemotron family to other open NVIDIA models, including those focused on computer vision, robotics, and vertical-specific applications.
Innovations in AI delivered by the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform from Day 0
Red Hat is launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA, a new edition of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform that incorporates the latest advancements from the NVIDIA platform since its release. In partnership with NVIDIA, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA will provide support for the most recent NVIDIA architectures starting from Day 0 availability, beginning with the NVIDIA Rubin platform.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA remains fully aligned with the mainline operating system. As updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA are incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, customers will be able to transition smoothly to the traditional Red Hat Enterprise Linux as needed for their production environments, with confidence that their systems will maintain expected performance levels and application compatibility.
This new approach offers customers an enterprise-grade Linux platform, ready for launch and fully compatible with the latest rack-scale AI innovations. This includes:
- Validated interoperability: Red Hat Enterprise Linux is validated for NVIDIA’s latest accelerators, helping ensure hardware and software resources work seamlessly, reducing deployment friction.
- Optimized driver management: Organizations can access validated NVIDIA GPU drivers (OpenRM) and CUDA toolkits through Red Hat Enterprise Linux repositories, simplifying lifecycle management of AI infrastructure.
- Enhanced security posture: Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a strengthened foundation with features like SELinux and proactive vulnerability management—essential for protecting sensitive data in AI training and inference scenarios.
- Consistency across hybrid clouds: Whether on-premises, at the edge, or in public clouds, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a unified platform for NVIDIA accelerated compute infrastructure, reducing infrastructure silos and minimizing total cost of ownership.
- Backed by the largest open source ecosystem in the industry: Red Hat Enterprise Linux benefits from extensive support from a broad array of software, hardware, and cloud providers, enabling greater choice and deeper capabilities in hybrid cloud environments.