Then there’s Cilium, which is what happens when boring infrastructure stops being boring, as I recently noted. Cilium’s journey report says the number of contributing companies rose 90% after it joined CNCF, from 533 to 1,011, while individual contributors jumped from 1,269 to 4,464. Google, Datadog, and Cloudflare all expanded their contributions as the project matured. That’s not random. Cilium sits at the intersection of networking, observability, and security, which are precisely the categories that become mission-critical once workloads become distributed, latency-sensitive, and expensive. AI may be driving headlines, but a lot of the real strategic work is happening in projects like Cilium, where the infrastructure determines whether those AI workloads are governable, visible, and efficient.
And how about Nvidia, a company with so much cash it could buy a few countries and set all their developers to work building for Nvidia. But this isn’t how Nvidia has chosen to spend its riches: It ranked 14th in Kubernetes contributions in the past two years, with 5,892 contributions. It has also open sourced KAI Scheduler, a Kubernetes-native GPU scheduler that came out of Run:ai, and Nvidia has described itself as a key contributor to Kubeflow. In other words, Nvidia isn’t just selling chips; it’s investing in the scheduling, orchestration, and workflow layers that determine how effectively those chips get used in real-world AI systems. And it’s doing so through developer communities, rather than lump sum cash payouts.
The Nvidia work is a tell for where open source is going in AI. CNCF says 66% of organizations hosting generative AI models now use Kubernetes for some or all inference workloads, and it explicitly calls Kubernetes the de facto operating system for AI. Of course it would say that, given the foundation’s dependence on Kubernetes as a tentpole project, but that doesn’t diminish the reality that Kubernetes and Kubeflow are increasingly central to training and inference systems. In sum, AI is making open infrastructure more important because few organizations really want to build their future on opaque, inescapable infrastructure they can’t inspect or influence.
