SUSE unveils AI partnerships amid sovereignty push

SUSE unveiled new artificial intelligence partnerships and product updates focused on data sovereignty and infrastructure management.

It introduced SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA, expanded work with Switch on shared systems for simulation and AI, widened its partner ecosystem for agentic AI, and formed a virtualisation migration partnership with Cloudbase Solutions. It also cited new research showing a gap between companies that say digital sovereignty is a priority and those that have started to act on it.

The moves come as businesses face pressure to adopt AI while keeping tighter control over where data sits, how models are governed, and which infrastructure vendors they depend on. SUSE said the latest work is designed to give customers more flexibility to run workloads across private infrastructure, data centres, edge environments, and mixed cloud estates.

Its research found that 98% of enterprises treat digital sovereignty as a strategic goal, while 52% have moved from ambition to active execution. That suggests many organisations still face operational and technical barriers when trying to turn policy goals into day-to-day systems design.

One of the main product announcements was SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA, which SUSE described as a unified software stack for enterprise AI. It is intended to help organisations assemble, deploy, manage, and govern AI applications across different environments while keeping sensitive data and logic inside private infrastructure.

The emphasis on sovereignty reflects broader concern among regulated industries and public sector users over control of data, model behaviour, and compliance obligations. For those customers, infrastructure location and the ability to avoid unwanted data movement have become procurement issues as much as technical ones.

AI and simulation

SUSE also outlined progress with Switch and NVIDIA on systems designed to run digital twin workloads and AI models on the same infrastructure. According to the company, the arrangement uses SUSE AI and NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to simulate and optimise data centre performance in real time.

Running simulation and AI on shared infrastructure could reduce the need for separate technology stacks for modelling, operations, and machine learning. That matters for companies trying to limit cost and complexity as AI workloads move beyond pilot projects.

Agentic ecosystem

Another part of the update focused on agentic AI, in which software agents automate tasks and actions across IT systems. SUSE said it has expanded its ecosystem through integrations with Amazon Quick, Fsas Technologies, n8n, and Revenium, as well as collaboration with Stacklok.

These links are intended to help customers connect and manage AI agents across Linux and Kubernetes environments with governance and security controls in place. The announcement points to a broader industry effort to make AI agents operable across existing enterprise systems rather than limiting them to standalone applications.

Migration push

SUSE also partnered with Cloudbase Solutions to integrate the Coriolis migration tool into SUSE Virtualisation. It said the setup allows enterprises to move virtualised workloads from VMware and public cloud platforms with no downtime through an automated, agentless process.

The move is aimed at organisations reassessing their virtualisation and cloud choices after rising costs and shifts in supplier strategies across the infrastructure market. Support for SAP environments suggests SUSE is targeting customers with large, business-critical estates that are often slower and more expensive to move.

Chief Executive Officer Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen linked the announcements to SUSE's longstanding position on open source and customer choice.

"This year's lineup of partnerships and product innovations at SUSECON reaffirms our commitment to open source and vision of helping customers break down barriers to avoid vendor lock-in," van Leeuwen said.

Beyond the product and partnership announcements, SUSE said its software portfolio is now available on Oracle Marketplace, providing another route to customers managing hybrid cloud environments. The company also used the gathering to highlight customer award winners including Airbus Defence and Space, CVS Health, Carnival Corporation, and PepsiCo.

SUSE has built its business around Linux, Kubernetes, edge software, and related infrastructure tools, and it is now trying to strengthen its role in AI management without moving away from that base. The latest announcements show the company tying AI more closely to longstanding customer concerns over compliance, migration risk, and dependence on large platform providers.

The research cited by SUSE may prove central to that pitch: nearly all enterprises say sovereignty matters, but only around half have begun to implement it.