The teams that run it in production already work with Kubernetes and the CNCF's other projects, says Ali Golshan, Nvidia's senior director of AI software, who leads the project. The company announced the move on Tuesday at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City.
OpenShell, which Nvidia launched at its GTC conference in March, joins the CNCF as a Sandbox project, the foundation's entry-level tier for early-stage projects. The CNCF formally accepted the project in late September.
The CNCF currently hosts 262 projects, including 155 at the Sandbox level, but it wasn't the only possible home for OpenShell. The CNCF's parent organization, the Linux Foundation, also runs the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), which hosts agentgateway, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.
Last month, the AAIF also took in OpenSandbox, a sandbox platform for AI agents that Alibaba contributed. "Securing and creating trust around AI is really infrastructure. That's really where you need to start."
