At this year’s OCP Global Summit 2025 in San Jose, the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation is signaling that open source networking has officially grown up — and it’s ready for the AI era.
The Linux Foundation–hosted open source network operating system (NOS) announced a string of milestones that underscore its transformation from a disruptive upstart to a trusted standard for cloud and AI-scale infrastructure. Highlights include Nexthop AI’s elevation to Premier membership, four new real-world deployment case studies, and expanded presence across OCP events, including deep-dive workshops hosted by Google.
“SONiC’s momentum reflects more than growth; it signals a shift in how the industry views open source NOS,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking, Edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation. “We’re lowering barriers to adoption and enabling organizations to confidently scale mission-critical infrastructure on open source.”
Nexthop AI Joins SONiC’s Governing Board
A long-time contributor to the SONiC ecosystem, Nexthop AI has been promoted from General to Premier membership, joining the SONiC Governing Board. The company has driven contributions across platform management, product support, and community leadership, reinforcing SONiC’s growing developer base.
“We look forward to advancing SONiC into a high-quality, efficient stack for Scale Out & Scale Up networking,” said Ryan Torres, VP of Software at Nexthop AI.
The move illustrates how SONiC continues to attract both hyperscalers and emerging AI infrastructure companies eager to move away from proprietary network stacks.
SONiC Goes Mainstream: Case Studies Span AI, Telecom, and Finance
Once viewed as an experimental open source project spun out of Microsoft’s data center playbook, SONiC has evolved into a globally deployed network operating system trusted in production environments across multiple sectors.
At OCP 2025, the Foundation unveiled four new case studies demonstrating SONiC’s real-world performance, flexibility, and cost advantages:
- SAKURA Internet launched SAKURAONE, an 800-GPU AI cloud built on SONiC, now ranked 49th in the global TOP500 supercomputers.
- Mitsui Knowledge Industry (MKI) deployed SONiC to power the Tokyo-1 supercomputer, achieving major cost savings and improved lifecycle control.
- Rakuten, a major telecom provider, validated SONiC across multi-vendor platforms, realizing over 50% cost savings compared to proprietary alternatives.
- A national retail payments operator in India modernized its infrastructure with SONiC, enabling hundreds of millions of daily transactions while cutting TCO by 40%.
These examples reflect how SONiC has evolved from hyperscale data centers into mainstream enterprise and financial use cases — a clear sign of open networking’s maturity.
SONiC Takes Center Stage at OCP Global Summit
Attendees at the OCP Global Summit 2025 (Oct. 13–17, San Jose) will see SONiC’s progress firsthand. The Foundation’s expanded presence spans multiple events, including:
- SONiC Workshop (Co-Located with OCP Summit): Technical deep dives, roadmap updates, and community sessions open to all OCP registrants.
- Live Demos on the Show Floor: Real-time SONiC deployments powering AI and cloud-scale workloads, multi-vendor interoperability showcases, and open networking swag giveaways.
- Google-Hosted Extended SONiC Workshop: Taking place at Google’s campus, this event brings together maintainers and contributors for working group sessions, TSC discussions, and next-phase roadmap planning.
Together, these sessions highlight SONiC’s journey from an OCP concept project to a cornerstone of open, AI-optimized networking infrastructure.
From Disruption to Standardization
Over the past decade, SONiC has become the de facto open NOS for hyperscalers, cloud providers, and AI infrastructure operators seeking flexibility and vendor neutrality. The Linux Foundation’s stewardship — combined with the OCP community’s momentum — is helping accelerate SONiC’s maturation into a production-grade platform with proven support for AI-scale workloads, multi-vendor interoperability, and cost-effective scalability.
With major ecosystem players like Nexthop AI moving up the governance ranks, SONiC’s evolution from open experiment to industry standard looks complete — and just in time for the next era of AI networking.
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