CIQ's Partnership with NVIDIA: Transforming Enterprise GPU Infrastructure

CIQ recently announced a partnership that transforms how the entire AI/ML/HPC industry can access and operationalize GPU acceleration: CIQ integrates the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit within our commercial Rocky Linux offerings. We deliver ready-to-run environments that dramatically reduce complexity, risk, and time-to-value for AI, machine learning, and HPC workloads.

This integration represents more than another Linux distribution with GPU support: it's a fundamental shift in how enterprises deploy and manage GPU-accelerated computing infrastructure.

The GPU deployment challenge

Every engineering organization deploying GPU workloads faces the same operational burden: manual CUDA installations, driver compatibility testing, library version management, and custom integration work, all before writing application code. When new hardware arrives or software updates are released, teams repeat this entire process, often discovering compatibility issues in production environments.

This old manual workflow introduces deployment delays, misconfiguration risks, and operational overhead that diverts engineering resources from valuable work. It creates barriers to unlocking the full performance of your NVIDIA accelerated computing investments.

Native integration that changes everything

Our partnership with NVIDIA eliminates this complexity through native integration of the complete CUDA toolkit, including NVIDIA's optimized libraries and development tools, directly into Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC). This isn't package bundling; it's engineering a cohesive platform where GPU acceleration becomes a first-class capability.

Rocky Linux is prominently featured among NVIDIA's officially supported Enterprise Linux distributions. We deliver approved, professionally supported solutions built upon NVIDIA's capabilities, ensuring enterprises get immediate GPU acceleration while maintaining licensing compliance.

The technical architecture delivers several key advantages:

• Fully tested, validated, and optimized stack: Every component is validated as part of a unified system.
• Immediate availability: Ready-to-run environments eliminate manual installations or custom integrations.
• Consistent deployment: Prebuilt images ensure consistency, portability, and compliance across environments.
• Professional support: Enterprise-grade support for the complete GPU-enabled stack.

Operational impact at scale

The engineering economics are transformative. What traditionally required weeks of integration and validation work now happens in minutes. Whether training large language models, running inference pipelines, or executing advanced scientific simulations, organizations can unlock the full performance of NVIDIA accelerated computing from development to production without the operational burden of managing that integration themselves.

The entire stack is tested, validated, and optimized as a unit, dramatically reducing the operational burden for teams deploying GPU-accelerated workloads at scale.

Enterprise-grade deployment options

CIQ provides prebuilt RLC with CUDA images through our registries and major cloud marketplaces. This ensures consistency, portability, and compliance, streamlining deployment across the entire GPU development lifecycle for organizations in regulated and performance-critical sectors.

Whether deploying in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments, teams get the same validated, GPU-ready infrastructure. This eliminates environment-specific configuration drift and provides predictable performance characteristics across deployment targets.

Empowering innovation through infrastructure

As our COO Bjorn Hovland notes, "This collaboration is all about empowering users. By delivering GPU-ready infrastructure with Rocky Linux, we're eliminating deployment complexity and helping customers extract maximum machine performance and efficiency from day one."

Rocky Linux has captured over 40% of Enterprise Linux market share because it provides enterprise capabilities without vendor constraints. Adding native NVIDIA CUDA integration reinforces this value proposition for the next generation of AI and HPC workloads.

The future of enterprise AI infrastructure

This integration transforms how enterprises approach GPU infrastructure. What once required specialized expertise and significant operational overhead is now available as a fully validated, professionally supported platform.

The result is infrastructure that enables innovation rather than constraining it.

Your teams can now deploy GPU-accelerated workloads with the same confidence, simplicity and speed as traditional enterprise workloads, and that changes the economics of AI and High Performance Computing at enterprise scale.