Red Hat, Nvidia expand partnership to secure AI agents

The expansion builds on existing BlueField-3 support in Red Hat OpenShift 4.22, where AI workloads on server CPUs are separated from networking and security services on BlueField's Arm processors. Red Hat says Sentry can quarantine a compromised agent in milliseconds, and moving monitoring and networking onto the data processing unit reduces demands on host CPUs.

On the model side, a joint reference design combines Model-as-a-Service access controls and an AI Gateway with inference technologies including vLLM, llm-d, Nvidia Dynamo and Nvidia NIM microservices. Based on Nvidia's Inference Hub reference design, it supports self-service model discovery, access policies, rate limits and subscription entitlement tracking. The companies also announced joint support for Nvidia Nemotron models, including Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, in the vLLM inference and serving engine and Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia.

For hardware deployment, Red Hat said RHEL for Nvidia 26.03 modifies a limited set of core packages to accommodate new hardware while retaining standard RHEL userspace and security controls, including Security-Enhanced Linux. Users can transition to mainline RHEL without reinstalling once the hardware patches mature and enter the upstream Linux kernel.