Red Hat has announced a landmark expansion of its collaboration with NVIDIA to align enterprise open source technologies to the rapidity of enterprise AI evolution and rack-scale AI advances.
As the industry moves beyond individual servers toward unified, high-density systems, Red Hat aims to deliver the starting point for this transformation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA, a specialized edition of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform that is optimized for the NVIDIA Rubin platform and tuned to drive future production on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI.
“NVIDIA’s architectural breakthroughs have made AI an imperative, proving that the computing stack will define the industry’s future,” said Matt Hicks, president and CEO, Red Hat. “To meet these tectonic shifts at launch, Red Hat and NVIDIA aim to provide Day 0 support for the latest NVIDIA architectures across Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and AI portfolios. Together, we are fueling the next generation of enterprise AI through the power of open source.”
“Red Hat revolutionized enterprise computing with industrial-strength open-source software,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “In the age of AI, the entire computing stack—from chips and systems to middleware, models, and the AI lifecycle—is being reinvented from the ground up. Together, NVIDIA and Red Hat are industrializing open source to bring AI to the enterprise, starting with the Vera Rubin platform.”
Moving into 2026, many organizations are poised to move AI from experimentation into production, with top-down strategies and centralized AI toolboxes that incorporate AI agents and other advances. This shift, however, demands a stable, high-performance and more secure infrastructure stack, from the underlying architecture to the software running on top of it.
The NVIDIA Rubin platform, featuring the new NVIDIA Vera CPU and advanced NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, is designed to deliver a giant leap forward in intelligence for agentic AI and advanced reasoning.
With Red Hat optimizing its hybrid cloud portfolio for NVIDIA’s breakthroughs, starting with Day 0 support for this new platform, Red Hat intends to empower organizations to scale their AI initiatives more confidently, with enterprise-grade reliability and a consistent operational model across the hybrid cloud.
The backbone for gigascale AI factories
The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform introduces transformative innovations, including the Vera CPU, the most power-efficient CPU for gigascale AI factories, the BlueField-4 data processor, as well as the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale solution. Today, Red Hat is announcing its intention to deliver Day 0 support for the NVIDIA Rubin platform across the Red Hat AI portfolio, encompassing:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as a bridge between this advanced hardware and the complex software ecosystems required for modern AI. As the fundamental building block for Red Hat’s robust portfolio of hybrid cloud solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat AI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will introduce support for NVIDIA Confidential Computing for the entire AI lifecycle, providing enhanced security capabilities for GPUs, memory and model data while giving organizations cryptographic proof that their most sensitive AI workloads maintain extensive protections.
- Red Hat OpenShift provides NVIDIA Rubin platform customers with ready access to the industry’s leading enterprise hybrid cloud platform powered by Kubernetes. To automate deployment, configuration and lifecycle management of accelerated computing, Red Hat OpenShift adds support for NVIDIA infrastructure software and the NVIDIA CUDA X libraries, delivering optimized performance of a wide range of accelerated workloads. Additionally, support for NVIDIA Bluefield delivers enhanced networking, advanced cluster management and improved resource utilization through a more consistent, enterprise-grade operational experience.
- Red Hat AI, Red Hat’s production-ready enterprise AI platform, will add new integrations with NVIDIA, expanding support for distributed inference with NVIDIA’s open source models on Red Hat AI Inference Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI. This includes Red Hat and NVIDIA working to expand support beyond the NVIDIA Nemotron family to other NVIDIA open models, including those aimed at vision, robotics and vertical-specific areas.
AI innovations served by the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform at Day 0
Red Hat is introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA, a new edition of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform that incorporates the latest NVIDIA platform advancements at launch. In collaboration with NVIDIA, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA will support the platform features of the latest NVIDIA architectures on Day 0 of availability, starting with the NVIDIA Rubin platform.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA remains fully aligned with the main build of the operating system. As improvements from Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA make their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, customers will be able to easily transition to the traditional Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their specific production demands require with the confidence that production systems will maintain expected performance levels and application compatibility.
With this new focus, Red Hat and NVIDIA are giving customers a launch-ready, enterprise-class Linux platform that fully supports the latest breakthroughs in rack-scale AI. This includes:
- Validated interoperability: Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a validated operating system for NVIDIA’s latest accelerators, helping to ensure that hardware and software capabilities work seamlessly to reduce deployment friction.
- Streamlined driver management: Organizations can access validated NVIDIA GPU OpenRM drivers and the CUDA toolkit directly through Red Hat Enterprise Linux repositories, simplifying the lifecycle management of AI infrastructure.
- Enhanced security posture: Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a hardened foundation with features like SELinux and proactive vulnerability management, critical for protecting sensitive data in AI training and inference environments.
- Hybrid cloud consistency: Whether on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a unified platform for NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure, reducing infrastructure silos and lowering the total cost of ownership.
- Backed by the industry’s largest commercial open source ecosystem: Red Hat Enterprise Linux is supported across a robust ecosystem of software, hardware and cloud providers to enable greater choice and deeper capabilities across hybrid cloud environments.
Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux support for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform will coincide with its general availability in the second half of 2026. Customers will be able to access the latest drivers and integration tools through the Red Hat Customer Portal.
