Red Hat Summit 2026: Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia Expands Support for a New Class of Autonomous Agents in the Enterprise

Red Hat, a key provider of open source solutions, announced new milestones in its co-engineered Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia software platform – advancing enterprise adoption of AI and autonomous, long-running agents.The latest updates introduce enhanced security capabilities for continuously operating agents and deliver ready-to-deploy solutions that help organizations move from experimentation to production faster and with confidence. Powered by the consistency and integrated AI platform capabilities of Red Hat AI Enterprise along with the open models, advanced tools, and frameworks within Nvidia AI Enterprise, this solution provides a unified, scalable foundation for production-grade agentic AI. 

Providing a safe runtime for a new class of agents
OpenShell is an open source project founded by Nvidia that provides a sandboxed runtime for autonomous AI agents, built to give enterprises stronger policy controls, safer tool use, and auditable operations. It governs how agents execute, what they can access, and where inference is routed. With OpenShell, organizations gain a single, unified policy layer to control and monitor how autonomous agents operate.  

Joint engineering work is underway to integrate OpenShell with Red Hat’s full-stack AI platform to help maintain oversight and policy at the infrastructure level.  Also, as a key contributor to the OpenShell upstream open source project, Red Hat is helping to standardize how autonomous agents are managed across the hybrid cloud.

AI sovereignty, security and architectural control with confidential containers
Beyond the software-defined governance, the Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia extends the trust boundary and enforces policies at the hardware level with confidential computing. This  is designed to protect vs. the runtime compromise of agents, even if another agent is breached. Now available in technology preview, users can run confidential containers with Nvidia Confidential Computing as part of Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers.

This hardware-enforced protection is further bolstered by a zero-trust architecture that integrates features like SELinux, FIPS compliance, and Nvidia DOCA-based runtime protection. By layering these controls from the core data center to the edge, the Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia helps enterprises protect critical assets in highly distributed environments and address evolving security and governance directives, including those introduced by frameworks such as the EU AI Act. 

Unified lifecycle management and Model-as-a-Service
Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia software now incorporates the breadth of innovations in Red Hat AI 3.4. This includes a new, governed Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) experience delivered via the Red Hat AI gateway, providing developers with streamlined access to curated models – such as Nvidia Nemotron – through standard OpenAI-compatible interfaces. To support operational oversight, the factory integrates production-ready lifecycle management powered by MLflow, enabling end-to-end tracing of LLM calls, tool execution, and reasoning step. This unified framework bridges the gap between developer velocity and operational stability, allowing organizations to audit how an agent arrived at an outcome.

Enhanced support for Nvidia Blackwell and Vera Rubin
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Nvidia 26.01, now available, marks a critical step forward for Red Hat to provide Day 0 support for Nvidia architectures. While the first iteration supports Nvidia Blackwell,  the companies are already co-engineering future releases to support the upcoming Nvidia Vera Rubin platform. In addition, Nvidia Run:ai, now included as part of Nvidia AI Enterprise, is available to Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia customers.

With this release, Red Hat strengthens the foundational support of the Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia and will also extend across the entire Red Hat AI portfolio, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat AI Enterprise, to fuel rapid development on the latest AI infrastructure across the hybrid cloud.

Blueprints designed to accelerate enterprise AI production
To accelerate time-to-value, Red Hat and Nvidia are providing validated, co-developed Nvidia AI Blueprints and AI quickstarts that simplify the deployment of complex AI patterns. These validated blueprints guide teams through critical use cases, including Model-as-a-Service for unified API model access, Enterprise Research for high-speed semantic reasoning vs. proprietary data, and Enterprise RAG & RAFT for grounding agents in proprietary data with Nvidia NeMo Retriever and Red Hat governance controls. Additional blueprints are currently in development as part of the platform’s ongoing roadmap.

Availability
Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia updates and Red Hat AI 3.4 are expected to be available later this month. Customers can access the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Nvidia drivers and specialized builds through the Red Hat Customer Portal. Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia software is available now.

Supporting Quotes
“Moving AI from corporate experimentation to an industrial engine requires a sovereign, consistent foundation across the hybrid cloud. Through our strategic co-engineering efforts with Nvidia, Red Hat provides the architectural control and open source innovation enterprises need to scale agentic AI with confidence. By delivering a hardened, zero-trust path for organizations to own their intelligence, we are enabling our customers to maintain technical independence in an increasingly complex global landscape,” said Chris Wright, CTO and SVP, global engineering, Red Hat.

“Agentic AI is transforming enterprise operations. Every company will need an AI factory to build, deploy and govern digital workers at scale. Red Hat and Nvidia are co-engineering the Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia, bringing Nvidia OpenShell, Nvidia Confidential Computing and the full AI stack together so enterprises can securely run their most demanding agentic AI workloads,” said Justin Boitano, VP, enterprise AI platforms, Nvidia.