Red Hat used NVIDIA GTC in Berlin on October 21 to announce new work with NVIDIA under its Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA offering. The announcement covers three areas: a runtime for AI agents, a reference design for serving models, and operating system support for NVIDIA’s next hardware.
RHEL for NVIDIA adds Vera CPUs
For sysadmins, the most concrete change is in the operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA, the partner-optimized edition of RHEL, now supports NVIDIA Vera CPUs, which NVIDIA pitches as a processor built for agent workloads. Red Hat also says it will deliver Day 0 enablement for the upcoming Vera Rubin platform, so its hybrid cloud portfolio is supported as soon as the hardware ships. SiliconANGLE reports that the related RHEL for NVIDIA 26.03 release changes a limited set of core packages to support the new hardware.
A reference design for model serving
Red Hat and NVIDIA built a joint reference design on Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA that combines Model-as-a-Service access control and an AI Gateway with vLLM, llm-d, NVIDIA Dynamo and NVIDIA NIM microservices. Based on NVIDIA’s Inference Hub design, it offers self-service model discovery, access policies, rate limiting and subscription entitlement tracking. NVIDIA’s Nemotron models, including Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, are supported in vLLM. Red Hat also highlighted FP8 quantization through its LLM Compressor and speculative decoding to cut inference latency.
An agent runtime
Red Hat is also working with NVIDIA on the OpenShell Reference Architecture. OpenShell is an open source sandbox runtime for AI agents, and Red Hat and NVIDIA are its leading contributors. Red Hat says it plans to build OpenShell into Red Hat AI and Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA as a native platform feature. SiliconANGLE notes the design relies on existing BlueField-3 support in OpenShift 4.22.
Red Hat says all of the joint use cases and reference designs are available through partners including Cisco, Dell Technologies and Lenovo. It’s Red Hat’s second notable platform announcement this week, after RHEL became a first-party offering on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Sources: Red Hat press release, SiliconANGLE.