Rebecca PY MALAYSIA, 2 SEPTEMBER 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 launch of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19. Alongside these software releases, the company introduced new incentives, partner programs, and resources designed to help channel partners accelerate business growth in emerging enterprise artificial intelligence markets.
Enterprises deploying production AI frequently run into infrastructure friction: modern AI accelerates adoption of containers, yet critical business applications and legacy data reside across virtualized and containerized setups. Nutanix solves this challenge through its governed, dual-native architecture, running traditional virtual machines and modern containerized AI side by side. By delivering AI directly to where enterprise data already resides, Nutanix eliminates data silos, avoids costly workload rearchitecting, and reduces networking complexity.
“Organizations across APJ are under pressure to turn AI ambition into business outcomes, while continuing to support the applications and infrastructure they already rely on,” said Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager – APJ, Nutanix. “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.”
Key updates featured in the Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) 2.8 release include:
Agent Gateway & MCP Integration: Features a generally available Model Context Protocol (MCP) Gateway that acts as a secure, unified entry point for AI agents to connect to enterprise applications and data. A complementary MCP Server for Nutanix Cloud Platform allows agents to securely interface with Nutanix-managed infrastructure.
Advanced Private Inference: Introduces multi-GPU inference via tensor parallelism, batch inference, and speculative decoding that speeds up token generation by up to 2.5x. It also adds Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for models under 8 billion parameters on single-GPU compute.
Rogue AI Protection: Strengthens platform security through fine-grained Identity and Access Management (IAM), custom roles, model sharing controls, and support for air-gapped NVIDIA NIM deployments to isolate agentic workloads.
The upcoming Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19 release expands on these capabilities with bare-metal automation (NKP Metal), enhanced network sandboxing via Nutanix Flow (NKP Full Stack), and a one-click AI Applications Catalog containing Kubeflow, Milvus, and Slurm. NKP has also achieved formal CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformant status.
To help channel partners monetize these hybrid cloud and AI opportunities, Nutanix launched the Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program and announced the general availability of Service Provider (SP) Central—a multitenant control plane giving service providers unified management to deliver infrastructure, cloud-native, and AI services. Both NAI 2.8 and SP Central are available immediately, with NKP 2.19 planned for general release shortly.