SUSE teams with NVIDIA to enable sovereign AI

Sovereign open infrastructure company SUSE has introduced the ability for enterprises to run workloads based on the NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture through SUSE AI Factory. Through a collaboration with NVIDIA, enterprises will be able to adopt private enterprise AI while maintaining full operational control, security and governance over their systems.

NVIDIA’s OpenShell Reference Architecture combines NVIDIA Vera Rubin for model inference, NVIDIA Vera CPUs running OpenShell for agent execution, and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs running NVIDIA DOCA-powered NVIDIA Sentry for host-independent monitoring and in-silicon policy enforcement.

SUSE is a launch partner for the architecture. By using Kubernetes sandboxing and API gateways alongside OpenShell, SUSE is able to offer customers active zero-trust governance over their AI workloads by continuously inspecting traffic and authorising access according to defined policies. SUSE is also able to offer data sovereignty and compliance by allowing only agent code execution within the corporate perimeter and restricting transfers of sensitive data outside private infrastructure, as well as a predictable cost model that eliminates third-party per-token public API fees.

The offering uses the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for NVIDIA platform, which is designed to provide immediate support for the latest in NVIDIA silicon and access to the latest hardware features.

The platform aims to eliminate production deployment friction by bridging development and production into a unified enterprise footprint, and to provide single-source technical support across the operating system, Linux kernel, GPU driver stack and Kubernetes runtime.

“As autonomous AI agents and next-generation silicon advancements reshape enterprise operations, AI sovereignty becomes non-negotiable,” SUSE chief technology and product officer Dr Thomas Di Giacomo said. “By combining enterprise Linux engineered for bleeding-edge hardware with active agent security, SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA OpenShell equips IT teams to scale AI rapidly while keeping proprietary data, system availability and budgets strictly under their control.”

To simplify software validation across the ecosystem, SUSE is also introducing a two-tiered independent software vendor certification structure. The ‘ready for’ certification will enable partners to self-validate their software compatibility and vendor support on their SUSE AI Factory or SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA, while the ‘certified for’ certification introduces jointly engineered and validated configurations featuring fully automated deployment and lifecycle management across both solutions.

Finally, SUSE and Fujitsu are partnering to provide an AI-driven hybrid quantum platform integrating SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA and NVIDIA CUDA-Q software on Fujitsu servers. The joint solution will aim to bring hybrid quantum intelligence out of the research lab and into the enterprise data centre.

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