The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation has added Lenovo, NADDOD, and Zhanwang (NEXAI) as General members, the organization announced ahead of the Open Compute Project Global Summit 2026 scheduled for October 12–15. The additions bring capabilities spanning enterprise infrastructure, high-speed interconnects, and networking silicon to advance AI networking development. The SONiC Foundation oversees the growth and adoption of SONiC, an open-source network operating system.
Each of the three new members contributes different technical expertise to the AI networking stack, according to the foundation. Lenovo is building SONiC-based automation and operations capabilities, NADDOD applies SONiC across its AI data center switch portfolio, and NEXAI is adapting SONiC to work with its networking products. Their planned work includes platform improvements, interoperability testing, and network observability. The foundation's 2026 schedule features live demonstrations during the summit, a co-located SONiC workshop on October 14, and an offsite workshop hosted by Nokia in Sunnyvale on October 16. A July 2026 architectural guide from the SONiC Scale-Up Working Group details efforts to enable low-latency, fault-tolerant Ethernet connections between tightly coupled AI accelerators, describing the project's technical direction with further API and software development planned.
"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," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation. At last year's OCP Global Summit, the SONiC Foundation highlighted AI infrastructure deployments, new case studies, and ecosystem growth, describing SONiC as evolving from a disruptive networking project into a platform used for large-scale infrastructure.
While SONiC's expanding vendor ecosystem could give solution providers more flexibility when building AI infrastructure, the foundation notes that differences in hardware support, software implementations, and vendor support arrangements mean partners still need to validate compatibility and performance across AI platforms, which could add integration and maintenance costs. Shifting to SONiC may require specialized networking expertise, increasing the burden on IT solution providers and managed service providers. The foundation's latest additions highlight the growing ecosystem around open-source networking for AI infrastructure, with broader hardware participation creating more opportunities for channel partners to design, integrate, and support multi-vendor AI networks as customers make increasingly interconnected AI infrastructure decisions. Before recommending SONiC, the report advises that partners should validate hardware compatibility, confirm the software features each workload requires, and establish responsibility for updates and troubleshooting. Open-source networking platforms present a choice between flexibility and complexity, one that solution providers will need to navigate as enterprise AI deployment accelerates.