The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation, an open-source network operating system (NOS) initiative under the Linux Foundation, has announced that Lenovo, NADDOD, and Zhanwang (NEXAI) have joined the organization as General Members. Their participation reflects the growing industry momentum behind SONiC as AI workloads, high-performance computing (HPC), cloud platforms, and modern data centers demand greater network speed, scalability, flexibility, and interoperability.
AI and HPC infrastructure are driving greater requirements for network bandwidth, latency, reliability and observability, while operators increasingly need the flexibility to build infrastructure across a broad ecosystem of networking technologies. The new members bring expertise spanning networking silicon, hardware platforms, high-speed interconnects, enterprise technology and large-scale infrastructure deployments, strengthening the SONiC community.
“AI infrastructure is raising the bar for networking, and the additions of Lenovo, NADDOD and NEXAI bring valuable knowledge from across the networking stack into the SONiC community. Their participation will help advance an open, collaborative networking ecosystem that can evolve alongside the rapidly changing requirements of AI, cloud and data center infrastructure.”
-Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation
Lenovo is building SONiC-based automation and AI-driven operations capabilities, with a focus on components including Redis, SAI, telemetry, BGP EVPN and RoCE, and plans to contribute deployment experience and platform enhancements back to the community as its capabilities mature. NADDOD uses SONiC across its AI data center switch portfolio and plans to contribute platform and SAI enhancements, interoperability testing, reference architectures and insights from real-world deployments. NEXAI is actively porting SONiC to its networking products and plans upstream contributions spanning RDMA and RoCE, Priority Flow Control, SRv6, telemetry and AI network observability. Their contributions will help advance SONiC to meet the needs of large-scale data center environments.
“Positioned at the forefront of the AI era, we are pioneering AI networking innovations anchored by SONiC to build Lenovo China’s “Token Factory”: AI-powered AI empowers AI. Guided by our vision of “Smarter AI for All,” Lenovo China is partnering with the SONiC community to foster open innovation. By driving the deep convergence of AI compute, storage, and networking, we are building a next-generation Token-Driven Network to power future Token Factories.”
– Billy Chen, ISG, VP, China Geo, Lenovo
“Advancing open networking for AI requires innovation across network software, switching and interconnects. NADDOD brings these together through our expertise in SONiC-based platforms and high-speed interconnects. We contribute an engineering perspective that connects hardware enablement, interoperability validation and RoCE optimization with the demands of today’s AI infrastructure, supporting collective progress across the open AI networking ecosystem.”
– Chang Liu, CTO, NADDOD
“Joining SONiC is a key milestone for NEXAI. We believe open-source networking is foundational for next-gen AI data center infrastructure. We look forward to contributing our expertise in high-performance switch silicon and working hand-in-hand with the SONiC community to advance cloud networking innovation.”
– Jeff Zhang, Senior Director of Technical Marketing, NEXAI
The SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) Foundation, under the Linux Foundation, drives the ongoing development and widespread adoption of SONiC, an open-source network operating system initially created to meet the demands of hyperscale cloud environments. Today, SONiC is deployed across production networks spanning cloud service providers, enterprises, telecommunications companies, and AI infrastructure worldwide. Its open, vendor-neutral architecture gives organizations the flexibility to operate network infrastructure across diverse hardware platforms while reducing dependence on individual vendors. Supported by a rapidly expanding community of contributors and member organizations, the SONiC ecosystem continues to evolve through open collaboration, delivering greater functionality, resilience, scalability, and operational efficiency.
