San Francisco – October 05, 2026 -- The SONiC Foundation, the open source network operating system hosted under the Linux Foundation, has added Lenovo, NADDOD and Zhanwang (NEXAI) as General Members, expanding its industry base ahead of the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose.
Three networking specialists join SONiC as AI infrastructure strains bandwidth and latency requirements
The additions bring expertise spanning networking silicon, hardware platforms, high-speed interconnects and enterprise infrastructure deployments. SONiC Foundation officials cited rising demands from AI, high-performance computing, cloud and data center operators for greater network bandwidth, reliability and observability as the driver behind the expansion.
Lenovo targets SONiC-based automation for AI-driven network operations
Lenovo is developing SONiC-based automation and AI-driven operations capabilities focused on Redis, SAI, telemetry, BGP EVPN and RoCE components. The company plans to contribute deployment experience and platform enhancements to the community as its capabilities mature. Billy Chen, VP of China Geo at Lenovo's ISG unit, said the company is building a next-generation Token-Driven Network to power what it calls Lenovo China's 'Token Factory,' anchored by SONiC.
NADDOD and NEXAI commit upstream contributions from AI data center deployments
NADDOD already uses SONiC across its AI data center switch portfolio and plans to contribute platform and SAI enhancements, interoperability testing and reference architectures drawn from real-world deployments. NEXAI is actively porting SONiC to its networking products, with planned upstream contributions covering RDMA and RoCE, Priority Flow Control, SRv6, telemetry and AI network observability.
SONiC Foundation schedules workshops during OCP Global Summit, running Oct. 12-15 in San Jose
The Foundation will run a booth with live demonstrations throughout the summit and host a co-located SONiC Workshop on Oct. 14. An extended offsite SONiC Workshop is scheduled for Oct. 16, hosted by SONiC Premier Member Nokia at its Sunnyvale office.
Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, said the new members bring knowledge from across the networking stack into the SONiC community to help the ecosystem evolve alongside AI, cloud and data center infrastructure requirements.