The Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Foundation continues to grow as the open networking group welcomed new members this week.

Ahead of the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, Lenovo, optics maker Naddod, and mysterious networking silicon firm NexAI (Zhanwang) signed up as general members.

Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking, edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation said the trio’s addition will “help advance an open, collaborative networking ecosystem that can evolve alongside the rapidly changing requirements of AI, cloud and data center infrastructure.”

SONiC continues to rise in popularity outside of the hyperscale world, with the likes of Arista, Broadcom and Cisco all on board. Notable recent signups include Nokia and Hewlett Packard Enterprise-owned Juniper Networks.

Its latest additions see Lenovo building SONiC-based automation capabilities, while Naddod is infusing SONiC across its AI data center switch portfolio.

NexAI is the outlier in this trio in that little is out there about the firm. Its website is sparse in both English and Chinese, though its career page seems to suggest it is developing networking silicon. Listings for roles across several Chinese cites including Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing cover architecture design for network ASICs.

According to the SONiC Foundation, NexAI is porting the open source network operating system to its networking products, with plans to upstream contributions spanning remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE), telemetry, and AI network observability.

“Joining SONiC is a key milestone for NexAI,” said Jeff Zhang, the vendor’s senior director of technical marketing. “We believe open-source networking is foundational for next-gen AI data center infrastructure. We look forward to contributing our expertise in high-performance switch silicon and working hand-in-hand with the SONiC community to advance cloud networking innovation.”

“Guided by our vision of ‘Smarter AI for All,’ Lenovo China is partnering with the SONiC community to foster open innovation. By driving the deep convergence of AI compute, storage, and networking, we are building a next-generation Token-Driven Network to power future Token Factories,” said Lenovo’s Billy Chen.

“Advancing open networking for AI requires innovation across network software, switching and interconnects,” Naddod CTO Chang Liu said. “Naddod brings these together through our expertise in SONiC-based platforms and high-speed interconnects.”

SONiC was developed by Microsoft before being bestowed upon OCP in 2016. Stewardship of the SONiC project later shifted to the Linux Foundation.