SUSE today revealed it has allied with NVIDIA to extend the scope of its infrastructure platform for building and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.
Announced at the SUSECON 2026 conference, the SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA will provide IT teams with the option of deploying a framework NVIDIA has developed for running AI models in a way that is integrated with the SUSE AI platform.
At the core of the SUSE AI platform is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server runtime and SUSE Rancher Prime, a framework for managing Kubernetes clusters. The NVIDIA AI Factory adds NVIDIA NIM microservices based on containers, open Nemotron models, NVIDIA NeMo for building and managing agents, NVIDIA Run:ai for GPU orchestration, NVIDIA Kubernetes Operators, the NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime for agents and NVIDIA NemoClaw, a reference stack for deploying more secure autonomous AI agents on lighter weight K3s clusters from SUSE.
Scheduled to be made available later this year, the combined offering provides access to a set of blueprints that will enable IT teams to deploy and manage AI infrastructure at a higher level of abstraction to deliver faster times to value, says Rhys Oxenham, general manager for the AI business at SUSE.
IT teams can, for example, build and test applications in a sandbox environment, while platform teams manage deployment through either a Rancher-based graphical interface or automated GitOps workflows to provide zero-trust guardrails and governance frameworks to AI workloads.
That combination enables IT teams to build and deploy AI applications in the cloud, a local data center or the network edge, adds Oxenham. That’s critical because IT teams need a more turnkey experience that enables them to solve an innovation gap that is being created by the pace at which multiple AI applications spanning a variety of use cases are now being built, he adds. The challenge is many of those applications are subject to rapid change requirements both as they are being built and after they are deployed, notes Oxhenham. “Enterprises need the ability to pivot whenever the business demands it,” he says.
The SUSE alliance with NVIDIA comes at a time when concerns about an organization’s ability to achieve and maintain AI sovereignty are increasing. In fact, a survey of 309 IT leaders from organizations in France, Germany, India, Japan and the U.S. finds nearly two-thirds noting that control over model training and AI provenance will be the top driver of digital resilience in the next five years. A recent Futurum Group report, meanwhile, projects global spending on AI platforms will increase at a 50% compound annual growth rate to reach $290 billion by 2023.
Of course, competition among providers of AI platforms is already fierce. SUSE is making a case for an open source approach that inherently provides IT teams with more control over both costs and deployment options at a time when organizations because of both recent changes to licensing terms for proprietary platforms and rising global political tensions are driving more organizations than ever to evaluate a wider range of platform options.
