Nutanix Gives Enterprises the Freedom to Run Production Agentic AI Their Way

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 virtualised and containerised 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 organisations to securely run, manage, and govern AI, containerised applications and virtualised workloads through a consistent control plane. These complement the core platform capabilities for near-bare metal performance for AI on virtualised 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 capitalise 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 operationalise 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 organisations a practical path to production without creating new silos or limiting future choice.” 

Nutanix Enterprise AI: Helping Enterprises Bring AI to Their Data Without Rebuilding Everything

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: 

• Agent Gateway: This now includes a generally available MCP Gateway which serves as a secure, unified front door for AI agents to access tools and data without custom engineering. To complement this, Nutanix has also released MCP Server for NCP to help customers build agentic AI applications with secure access to the infrastructure managed by Nutanix.  
• Private Inference: New advanced inference and fine tuning capabilities enable scalable, multiGPU inference for LLMs via tensor parallelism, delivering high-throughput serving and low-latency response times for enterprise LLM workloads. In addition, this enables batch inference and speculative decoding. Key features include: 1) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning which supports Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning for smaller models (<8B parameters), helping organisations to cost-effectively customise open LLMs on private domain data using single-GPU compute while seamlessly deploying adapters straight to serving pipelines; 2) Scalable multiGPU serving which enables high-throughput multiGPU inference via tensor parallelism, delivering fast, distributed serving across enterprise hybrid cloud environments; and 3) Speculative decoding which accelerates LLM inference token generation by up to 2.5x using lightweight draft models, cutting output latency without sacrificing model accuracy. 
• Enhanced Security against Rogue AI: With the rise of agentic AI and the risk of models breaking out of sandboxes, security is paramount. NAI provides robust protection against rogue models through our platform and APIs, featuring fine-grained Identity and Access Management (IAM), custom roles and seamless model sharing. This enforces least-privilege security, helping ensure agents operate securely and restricting access to only authorised roles, as well as support for air-gapped NVIDIA NIM deployment.

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform: A Trusted, Production-Ready Foundation for Modern Apps and AI 

With NKP, organisations 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-optimised platform for building and running agentic applications at scale, including the following features coming soon:

• NKP Metal: Built to bring HCI-grade simplicity to bare-metal Kubernetes, with automated OS, firmware, and container deployment, and persistent, enterprise-grade storage natively, eliminating the complexity of patchwork platforms. 
• NKP Full Stack: While NKP Metal is intended to bring simplicity to bare-metal deployments, NKP on AHV remains the cornerstone for organisations requiring robust, agile virtualised environments. Combined with Nutanix Flow, NKP on AHV is designed to deliver stronger network-level sandboxing for AI agents, helping provide essential isolation to mitigate the risk of rogue attacks and lateral movement. 
• AI Applications Catalog: Offers a one-click deployment path for curated, validated AI/ML software (Kubeflow, Milvus, Slurm) to help bypass manual integration challenges.
• Hardware and Compliance: Planned expansion of ecosystem support with validated GPU integrations, alongside dynamic resource allocation for modern AI workloads.

CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformant Platform: NKP has attained formal CNCF certification to validate that NKP provides the standardised APIs and capabilities required to reliably operate enterprise AI workloads.

AI Storage Performance and Validated Certifications with NVIDIA 

Demanding AI workloads require infrastructure that keeps data moving, maximises GPU utilisation, 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, maximising GPU utilisation and ensuring linear scalability for large-scale production AI workloads. 

Helping Partners Build, Monetise and Grow AI Services 

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 capitalise 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 maximise 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 monetise services. Service Provider Central gives providers one consistent foundation to build and monetise 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 utilisation and protect margins while giving customers more choice in how and where they run applications and AI workloads. 

Nutanix Customer Comment

“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 organisation depends on.”

Jasim Abdul Rahman, Group Chief Information Officer, Power International Holding

Industry Analyst Commentary

“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 prioritising platform consistency as application portfolios span legacy, refactored, and cloud-native designs.”  

• Matt Flug, IDC 

Ecosystem Partners Commentary

“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 organisations greater choice in how they deploy and operate AI while maintaining the control they need across their environment.”

– Jeremy Foster, Cisco GM & SVP, Cisco Compute

“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 organisations in highly regulated industries to innovate faster and focus on their core business, while maintaining the security, compliance, and operational control they require.”

— Edward O’Connor, Chief Technology Officer at Continent 8 Technologies

“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.” 

– Bill Pearson, VP, Data Center Software, Intel

Availability

NAI 2.8 and SP Central are generally available now. NKP 2.19 will be available soon. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Nutanix’s dual-native architecture?Nutanix treats virtual machines and containers as first-class infrastructure, giving organisations a consistent way to run and govern traditional applications, modern apps and AI workloads.

How does Nutanix give customers more choice in where they run AI and why is this important?Nutanix enables organisations 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.

How does Nutanix help enterprises connect AI with existing applications and data?Nutanix brings AI closer to the applications, workflows and proprietary data already running in enterprise environments, helping customers reduce silos and minimise the need for costly rearchitecture.

How does Service Provider Central help partners deliver cloud and AI services?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 monetise these offerings while maintaining centralised operations and governance, built on top of NCP’s multitenant architecture.

 *Gartner, 2026 Strategic Roadmap for VMware Modernisation, 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