Nutanix treats virtual machines and containers as first-class infrastructure, giving organizations a consistent way to run and govern traditional applications, modern apps and AI workloads.
August 26, 2026
San Jose, Calif. – Aug. 26, 2026 – Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a hybrid cloud leader and AI innovator, today announced the general availability of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) 2.8, and the upcoming general availability of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19, along with new incentives, programs, and resources designed to help partners accelerate growth on emerging AI opportunities.
Many enterprises face a major roadblock when deploying AI: AI is accelerating the shift to containers, while critical applications and data remain spread across both virtualized and containerized environments. This divide can force enterprises to add infrastructure silos, move data or rearchitect existing workloads to support AI alongside the applications and data they already run. Nutanix addresses this with a governed, dual-native architecture that runs traditional applications and modern AI side by side, allowing the infrastructure to flexibly support the workload, integrated with leading silicon partners to provide choice and flexibility to customers. By bringing AI to where enterprise data already lives, Nutanix helps customers reduce silos and accelerate ROI without costly rearchitecting or added networking and data layer complexity.
Expanding on NCP capabilities, NAI and NKP are designed to enable organizations to securely run, manage, and govern AI, containerized applications and virtualized workloads through a consistent control plane. These complement the core platform capabilities for near-bare metal performance for AI on virtualized infrastructure introduced with NCI 7.6. Together, they give enterprises a flexible alternative to infrastructure stacks that limit architectural choice, drive up costs, and require disruptive platform changes.
For partners, the new Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program aims to enable them to capitalize on major industry shifts and next-generation AI deployments by empowering them to build validated, high-margin services practices that span the full customer lifecycle. To operationalize these flexible new offerings, Service Provider (SP) Central provides an adaptable multitenant cloud foundation, giving service providers the control they need to grow infrastructure, platform, cloud-native, and AI services on their own terms.
“Enterprise AI should not require customers to rebuild the systems that already run their business,” said Thomas Cornely, Executive Vice President, Product Management, Nutanix. “With our dual-native architecture, customers can bring AI to their existing applications and data while running each workload on the infrastructure best suited to it, with consistent operations and governance across VMs, containers and AI. This gives organizations a practical path to production without creating new silos or limiting future choice.”
NAI delivers a unified and secure platform to deploy, manage, and scale AI workloads across hybrid environments. It enables enterprises to enforce governance over their agents and models, gain total visibility over token usage, and streamline AI development with a simple interface with built-in observability metrics and easy to use model-as-a-service while ensuring security, scalability, and integration with existing infrastructure.
Key NAI updates include:
With NKP, organizations can simplify container operations across containers running on bare metal and VMs without piecing together complex, custom stacks. The upcoming release will provide an AI-optimized platform for building and running agentic applications at scale, including the following features coming soon:
CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformant Platform: NKP has attained formal CNCF certification to validate that NKP provides the standardized APIs and capabilities required to reliably operate enterprise AI workloads.
Demanding AI workloads require infrastructure that keeps data moving, maximizes GPU utilization, and reduces deployment risk. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) recently achieved NVIDIA-Certified Storage validation at the enterprise level, providing a trusted, interoperable foundation that helps eliminate data bottlenecks. NUS establishes a low-latency, high-throughput data path directly to GPUs, maximizing GPU utilization and ensuring linear scalability for large-scale production AI workloads.
According to Gartner®, “By 2029, 55 percent of enterprises will migrate 100 percent of workloads from VMware to alternative infrastructure delivery solutions”.* To help partners capitalize on this market shift, next-generation AI deployments and other emerging opportunities, Nutanix recently launched the Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program. This program provides the framework to support the broader partner ecosystem in transitioning from traditional, one-time deals to high-margin, recurring revenue streams by building validated services practices. Backed by streamlined onboarding, comprehensive service delivery kits, and exclusive badging across hybrid cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and VM migration, the program equips partners to own the full customer lifecycle, drive faster time-to-value, and maximize long-term retention.
Nutanix is also announcing the general availability of SP Central, a unified multitenant control plane that gives displaced VMware service provider partners greater choice in how they build and monetize services. Service Provider Central gives providers one consistent foundation to build and monetize a broad portfolio of infrastructure, application, cloud-native, and AI services, with the flexibility on deployment location and licensing they need. This is designed to help providers improve utilization and protect margins while giving customers more choice in how and where they run applications and AI workloads.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform gives us a dual-native architecture that is governed and brings AI to our applications and data across virtual machines and containers. This helps speed AI innovation across the production environments our organization depends on.
By introducing a “dual native” model that unifies services such as networking, security, and data protection across both VMs and containers, Nutanix is leaning into a competitive landscape where consistent policy enforcement and lifecycle management are becoming key differentiators. Enterprises are increasingly prioritizing platform consistency as application portfolios span legacy, refactored, and cloud-native designs.
As enterprises deploy agentic AI to automate complex workflows, they need infrastructure that delivers the performance, security and control required for production environments. Cisco is bringing that foundation. Together with Nutanix’s governed, dual-native cloud operating model, we’re giving organizations greater choice in how they deploy and operate AI while maintaining the control they need across their environment.
At Continent 8 Technologies, we've worked closely alongside Nutanix to help shape the next generation of cloud services for regulated industries. Our continued collaboration with Nutanix, including the development of Service Provider Central, is built around helping our customers adopt modern cloud and AI capabilities without adding unnecessary complexity. Together, we're enabling organizations in highly regulated industries to innovate faster and focus on their core business, while maintaining the security, compliance, and operational control they require.
The rise of agentic AI is redefining how AI services are delivered, making security and sovereignty foundational requirements. Through our collaboration with Nutanix, we are enabling enterprises and service providers to build high-performance, multitenant AI platforms with hardware-enforced isolation and security. This ensures that sensitive data and models remain protected in use, delivering the secure scale and efficiency required for next-generation AI factories.
NAI 2.8 and SP Central are generally available now. NKP 2.19 will be available soon.
Nutanix treats virtual machines and containers as first-class infrastructure, giving organizations a consistent way to run and govern traditional applications, modern apps and AI workloads.
Nutanix enables organizations to place AI workloads on the infrastructure best suited to their performance, data and business requirements without forcing every workload into the same architecture, including across VMs and containers, CPUs and GPUs (and other accelerators), private and public model providers, and more. For example, agentic AI applications often involve agents that are compute-intensive (running on CPUs) and intelligence functions that require GPU acceleration. Nutanix allows agents as well as Inference workloads to run on the optimal substrate with a unified AI cloud control plane.
Nutanix brings AI closer to the applications, workflows and proprietary data already running in enterprise environments, helping customers reduce silos and minimize the need for costly rearchitecture.
SP Central gives service providers a self-service tenant lifecycle management platform to build and deliver infrastructure, platform, cloud-native, and AI services, supporting their efforts to monetize these offerings while maintaining centralized operations and governance, built on top of NCP’s multitenant architecture.
*Gartner, 2026 Strategic Roadmap for VMware Modernization, Julia Palmer, et al., 7 April 2026
GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
IDC, Nutanix .NEXT 2026: Enabling Customer Choice in Compute and Deployment Architectures, April 10, 2026, Matt Flug
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a hybrid cloud leader and AI innovator, offering organizations a unified infrastructure software platform to safely run applications, data, and AI anywhere. Trusted by customers worldwide, Nutanix empowers more than 50% of the Global 2000 to innovate faster with AI, while modernizing infrastructure, simplifying operations, and controlling costs. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media.
Media Contact:
Ken Lotich
pr@nutanix.com