Nokia Joins SONiC Foundation as Premier Member, Strengthening Open Networking Innovation for AI-Scale Infrastructure

• Nokia's Premier membership deepens its long-standing contributions and reinforces SONiC's momentum as the leading open source NOS for AI and cloud-scale networking.
• Mirza Arifovic, R&D Lead at Nokia, joins the SONiC Governing Board to shape strategic mission
• Nokia will expand upstream collaboration and help advance high-capacity, AI-optimized data center fabrics.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation, an open source network operating system (NOS) hosted under the Linux Foundation, today announced that Nokia has joined as a Premier member. The advancement reflects Nokia's long-standing contributions to the SONiC community and reinforces its commitment to open, scalable, and AI-ready data center networking. Additionally, Nokia's Mirza Arifovic, R&D Lead, joins the SONiC Governing Board to collaboratively advance the project's strategic mission.

Nokia has been a leading SONiC contributor since 2019, ranking among the top five organizations for contributions, and delivering key innovations such as chassis and multi-ASIC architecture implementations, Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) contributions, ARM architecture enablement and small-footprint optimizations. Nokia plans to deepen its engagement and expand participation across working groups. "We are delighted to welcome Nokia as a Premier member of the SONiC Foundation," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation. "Nokia has played a critical role in advancing SONiC from its early days to today's AI-scale deployments. Their leadership in high-performance hardware, expertise in software development and global-scale network engineering strengthens the community and accelerates the adoption of open source NOS across hyperscale, enterprise, and telecom markets."

"For the past five years, Nokia has been a proactive and committed member of the SONiC community, delivering key innovations that are now deployed at global scale in data center networks. Joining the SONiC Foundation as a Premier member builds on this proven commitment, allowing us to accelerate open source collaboration and combine the community's efforts with our high-performance hardware and modern automation solutions to power the next generation of cloud and AI infrastructure," said Rudy Hoebeke, Vice President, Software Product Management, Nokia IP Networks Business Division.

The addition of Nokia to SONiC's Premier member roster further solidifies its position as a leading open source NOS for AI, cloud, and large-scale networking, supported by a global ecosystem that relies on SONiC to deploy flexible, vendor-agnostic networks with stronger automation, reliability, and community-driven innovation. Nokia joins existing SONiC Foundation Premier member organizations, including Alibaba, Arista Networks, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google, Intel, Marvell, Microsoft, Nexthop AI, and Nvidia. To learn more about the SONiC Foundation and how to get involved, visit www.sonicfoundation.dev

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The Linux Foundation

SOURCE SONiC