The Linux Foundation | 05 October 2026
New members bring expertise in networking silicon, infrastructure and high-speed Ethernet as the SONiC community gathers at the OCP Global Summit 2026
Summary
- The SONiC Foundation welcomes Lenovo, NADDOD and Zhanwang (NEXAI) as new General Members, expanding industry participation across AI, high-performance computing, cloud and data center networking.
- The new members bring complementary expertise across high-performance networking, with Lenovo bringing experience in enterprise technology and infrastructure, and NADDOD and NEXAI planning upstream technical contributions.
- The new members join the SONiC community ahead of the OCP Global Summit 2026, where the SONiC Foundation will participate in a series of events and technical sessions encouraging community discussions and collaboration.
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 5, 2026 – The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation, an open source network operating system (NOS) hosted under the Linux Foundation, today announced that Lenovo, NADDOD and Zhanwang (NEXAI) have joined as General Members. The additions demonstrate continued industry investment in SONiC as AI, high-performance computing (HPC), cloud and data center environments place new demands on network performance, scalability 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,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “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.”
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.
SONiC at OCP Global Summit 2026
New members will join the SONiC community ahead of the 2026 OCP Global Summit, taking place Oct. 12-15 in San Jose, where the community will come together for a series of Foundation-led activities, including:
- A SONiC Foundation booth with live demonstrations throughout the summit
- A co-located SONiC Workshop on Oct. 14
- An extended offsite SONiC Workshop on Oct. 16, hosted by SONiC Premier Member Nokia at its Sunnyvale office. Register for the Extended Offsite SONiC Workshop.
Learn more about SONiC activities during OCP Global Summit 2026 and view the SONiC agenda.
Supporting Quotes
“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
About the SONiC Foundation
The SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation, supports the development and adoption of SONiC, an open source network operating system originally developed for hyperscale cloud environments. Today, SONiC powers production networks across cloud providers, enterprises, telecommunications providers, and AI infrastructure worldwide. Built on an open, vendor-neutral architecture, SONiC enables organizations to deploy and manage network infrastructure across multiple hardware platforms while avoiding vendor lock-in. Its growing ecosystem of contributors and member organizations continuously advances features, reliability, and scalability through open collaboration. To learn more about the SONiC Foundation and how to get involved, please visit https://sonicfoundation.dev.