Why Red Hat matters
At Red Hat Summit 2026 in May, Red Hat released Red Hat AI 3.4 with a bring-your-own-agent capability and agent sandboxing tools such as Red Hat Desktop. IBM and Red Hat committed $5 billion on May 28, 2026 to open source development for the AI era. Red Hat launched the llm-d project for distributed inference on May 20, 2025 with Google Cloud, NVIDIA, CoreWeave and IBM Research as founding contributors.
The numberIBM and Red Hat committed $5B to open source for the AI era on May 28, 2026
North Carolina connection
Red Hat is headquartered in downtown Raleigh (Red Hat Tower) and was founded in North Carolina in 1993.
On The All Things AI 100
Listed under North Carolina. AI companies headquartered or anchored in North Carolina.
Quick answers
- What does Red Hat do?
- Enterprise open source software: RHEL, OpenShift and the Red Hat AI platform for running models and agents. At Red Hat Summit 2026 in May, Red Hat released Red Hat AI 3.4 with a bring-your-own-agent capability and agent sandboxing tools such as Red Hat Desktop.
- What AI capabilities does Red Hat offer?
- Red Hat offers Red Hat AI, including a bring your own agent runtime, and Red Hat OpenShift AI so companies can deploy, serve, and manage models and agent workloads on supported enterprise infrastructure. The software includes tools for model customization, inference, and MLOps, with open source components such as InstructLab. IT teams use it to run AI applications inside existing Red Hat environments with access controls and operations support.
- Why is Red Hat on The All Things AI 100?
- Red Hat is listed under North Carolina. AI companies headquartered or anchored in North Carolina. IBM and Red Hat committed $5B to open source for the AI era on May 28, 2026.
- Where is Red Hat based, and who owns it?
- Red Hat is based in Raleigh, NC, was founded in 1993 and is subsidiary of IBM (acquired 2019).