NEWS SUMMARY
- Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) is being enhanced and expanded for production agentic AI with its dual-native architecture, including the introduction of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) 2.8 and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19.
- The new capabilities give customers a flexible cloud operating model designed to consistently manage and govern AI across environments, supported by a dual-native architecture for virtual machines and containers.
- NAI 2.8 is available now. It provides centralised control for AI inference and agentic AI, including Nutanix Agent Gateway, now with a generally available Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway for governing how agents connect with apps and data via MCP. Nutanix Private Inference also provides enhanced capabilities for high-performance fine tuning and inference, along with improved security and governance.
- NKP 2.19 will be available soon. It is expected to provide streamlined container management for bare metal and virtualised environments, with a built-in AI catalogue designed for building and running agentic AI applications.
- The new capabilities in NAI 2.8 and NKP 2.19, combined with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certification, enhance NCP dual-native and AI capabilities.
- Nutanix: Verified Services program and Service Provider (SP) Central are now available to help partners drive new AI opportunities.
WHY IT MATTERS
Enterprises often struggle to deploy AI alongside the apps and data it needs to access. Nutanix aims to solve this with a governed, dual-native architecture that runs both virtual machines (VMs) and containers side-by-side. This allows customers to bring AI directly to their apps and data regardless of how they are deployed, helping accelerate ROI without adding architectural complexity.
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 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.
“Organisations across APJ are under pressure to turn AI ambition into business outcomes, while continuing to support the applications and infrastructure they already rely on. As agentic AI adoption accelerates, the priority across the region is finding a simpler way to run AI at scale, with the governance, security and consistency required for production environments. Customers want the flexibility to adopt AI on their own terms, without embarking on large-scale rearchitecting projects. At the same time, there are significant opportunities for partners and service providers to develop new AI and cloud services that help customers accelerate their modernisation efforts,” said Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager – APJ, Nutanix
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 Catalogue: 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.
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
“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
Availability
NAI 2.8 and SP Central are generally available now. NKP 2.19 will be available soon.
*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.
©2026 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo, and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or unregistered trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. (“Nutanix”) in the United States and other countries. Other brand names or marks mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This press release is for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes a warranty or other binding commitment by Nutanix. This content contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements regarding the availability and capabilities of the upcoming NKP 2.19 release, its features, performance, integrations, certifications and ecosystem support, the functionality and strategic direction of NAI and SP Central, and our plans and expectations regarding the Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program. Such statements are not historical facts and are instead based on our current expectations, estimates, and beliefs. The accuracy of such statements involves risks and uncertainties and depends upon future events, including those that may be beyond our control, and actual results may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements, including, among others: potential development or distribution delays; risks inherent in the adoption of new agentic AI technologies and multi-tenant infrastructure solutions; the effectiveness of security and governance frameworks; our ability to successfully launch and gain market acceptance for new partner programs and service delivery models; and evolving industry standards for AI-driven automation. Any forward-looking statements included speak only as of the date hereof and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update or otherwise revise any such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. Customer statements and reports on results, benefits, savings or other outcomes depend on a variety of factors including their use case, individual requirements, and operating environments, and should not be construed to be a promise or obligation to deliver specific outcomes. Certain information contained in this content may link or refer to, or be based on, studies, publications, surveys, and other data obtained from third-party sources. While we believe these third-party studies, publications, surveys, and other third-party data are reliable as of the date of publication, they have not independently verified unless specifically stated, and we make no representation as to the adequacy, fairness, accuracy, or completeness of any information obtained from a third-party. Our decision to publish, link to or reference third-party data should not be considered an endorsement of any such content.
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