New members bring expertise in network chips, infrastructure, and high-speed Ethernet. The SONiC community will gather for exchanges during OCP Global Summit in 2026.

• The SONiC Foundation welcomes Lenovo, NADDOD, and Zhanwang ( NEXAI ) to join as new regular members, expanding our industry presence in the fields of AI, high-performance computing, cloud, and data center networking.
• New members bring complementary high-performance networking experience, among which Lenovo has expertise in enterprise technology and infrastructure, while NADDOD and NEXAI plan to contribute technology upstream.
• These new members joined the SONiC community before the OCP Global Summit event in 2026; by then, the SONiC foundation will participate in a series of activities and technical conferences to promote community discussion and collaboration.

San Francisco, October 5, 2026 / PRNewswire / -- The open-source network operating system ( NOS ) hosted by Linux Foundation announced today that Lenovo, NADDOD, and Zhanwang ( NEXAI ) have joined as regular members. This addition of new members indicates that as AI, high-performance computing ( HPC ), cloud, and data center environments place new demands on network performance, the industry's investment in SONiC continues to grow.

AI and HPC infrastructure are driving higher demands in terms of network bandwidth, latency, reliability, and observability, while operators increasingly need to build flexibility into their infrastructure within a broader network technology ecosystem. New members have brought professional capabilities that cover network chips, hardware platforms, high-speed interconnections, enterprise technologies, and large-scale infrastructure deployment, further strengthening the SONiC community.

Linux Foundation, General Manager of Networks, Edge, and Internet of Things, stated: "The AI infrastructure is raising the standards of networking. The participation of Lenovo, NADDOD, and NEXAI will bring valuable knowledge from all levels of the network technology stack to the SONiC community. Their involvement will help to promote an open and collaborative network ecosystem that can evolve in response to the rapidly changing needs of AI, cloud, and data center infrastructure."

Lenovo is building automated and AI-driven operations and maintenance capabilities based on SONiC. They are focusing on components such as Redis, SAI, telemetry, BGP EVPN, and RoCE. Once these capabilities are matured, they plan to share their deployment experiences and platform enhancements with the community. NADDOD uses SONiC in its AI data center switch product portfolio and plans to contribute platform enhancements, interoperability testing, reference architectures, as well as experience from real-world deployments. NEXAI is in the process of migrating SONiC to its network products and plans to make upstream contributions in areas such as RDMA, RoCE, Priority Flow Control, SRv6, telemetry, and AI network observability. Their contributions will help SONiC meet the needs of large-scale data center environments.

SONiC to Debut at OCP Global Summit in 2026

New members will join the SONiC community before OCP Global Summit in 2026. The summit will be held from October 12th to 15th in San Jose, and during that time, the community will participate in a series of activities led by the foundation, including:

• SONiC Fund exhibition booth, on-site demonstrations will be conducted during the summit.
• SONiC Joint Seminar Held on October 14th
• The extended off-exchange SONiC seminar held on October 16th was hosted by SONiC platinum member Nokia in their Sunnyvale office. Registration is open for the extended off-exchange SONiC seminar as well.

Learn more about SONiC's activities during the period from OCP Global Summit to 2026, and view the schedule for SONiC.

Supporting quotes

Standing at the forefront of the AI era, we are leading network innovation with SONiC as the foundation, creating Lenovo China's 'Token Factory': AI empowering AI. Upholding the vision of 'Smarter AI for All, Lenovo China is collaborating with the SONiC community to promote open innovation. By advancing the deep integration of AI computing, storage, and networking, we are building the next generation of Token driven networks to power the future Token Factory.

—— Lenovo ISG Vice President of China Billy Chen

To advance an open network oriented towards AI, continuous innovation is required in network software, switching, and interconnection. NADDOD leverages its expertise in platforms based on SONiC and high-speed interconnection to combine these capabilities. We provide an engineering perspective that connects hardware adaptation, interoperability verification, and RoCE optimization with the current demands of AI infrastructure, supporting the common progress of the open AI network ecosystem.

—— NADDOD CTO Chang Liu

Joining SONiC is an important milestone for NEXAI. We believe that open-source networks are the cornerstone of the next generation of AI data center infrastructure. We look forward to contributing our expertise in high-performance switching chips and working hand in hand with the SONiC community to drive innovation in cloud networking.

—— NEXAI Senior Director of Technical Marketing Jeff Zhang

About the SONiC Foundation

SONiC ( Software for Open Networking in the Cloud ) The foundation is managed by Linux Foundation and supports the development and adoption of SONiC. SONiC is an open-source network operating system originally developed for ultra-large-scale cloud environments. Today, SONiC provides support for production networks of global cloud service providers, enterprises, telecommunications operators, and AI infrastructure. SONiC adopts an open, vendor-neutral architecture that allows organizations to deploy and manage network infrastructure on a variety of hardware platforms while avoiding vendor lock-in. Its growing ecosystem of contributors and member organizations continuously advances functionality, reliability, and scalability through open collaboration. To learn more about the SONiC foundation and how to get involved, please visit https :// sonicfoundation.dev.

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