RLC Pro AI delivers more AI output per dollar of infrastructure investment, with validated performance gains and use-cases for any organization with AI-based workloads, at any scale, in any environment.

RENO, Nev., March 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, today announced the general availability of Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro AI (RLC Pro AI), an Enterprise Linux distribution purpose-built for AI inference and GPU-accelerated workloads, engineered to deliver more from every GPU in production. RLC Pro AI ships today with PyTorch and the full NVIDIA CUDA and DOCA-OFED stack, with expanded support for additional hardware partners and frameworks on the active roadmap.

AI infrastructure is now core to how enterprises operate. Organizations across every industry are moving GPU-accelerated workloads into production, and the operating system (OS) has become the constraint. The OS underneath AI workloads determines how much performance the hardware actually delivers. For most enterprises, that performance has been left on the table.

RLC Pro AI is purpose-built to maximize that performance, with every layer of the stack validated and pre-configured for AI workloads. The CIQ Linux Kernel (CLK), GPU drivers, libraries and frameworks are tuned and validated together for AI workloads, optimized from bare metal to Kubernetes to sovereign on-premises infrastructure. The result is an Enterprise Linux distribution that runs on the hardware enterprises are buying today, delivers day-one support for current GPU accelerators from NVIDIA and ships production-ready from first boot.

"The OS is where GPU ROI is won or lost, and the industry has ignored it for too long," said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux. "Organizations are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to GPU infrastructure and running it on operating systems that were never designed for it. RLC Pro AI simplifies and de-risks AI infrastructure investments while driving cutting-edge performance and simplicity."

RLC Pro AI delivers:

• More output from existing hardware. CLK kernel, PyTorch flags and CUDA configurations ship pre-configured at first boot. No manual tuning. Organizations running inference at scale see measurably higher throughput gains on the GPUs they already own from day one.
• Infrastructure economics that improve with scale, not against it. More throughput from the same hardware means fewer resources are needed to hit the same output targets. At the node level, at the cluster level, and at the fleet level, the economics of RLC Pro AI get better as deployments grow.
• A complete, validated AI stack with CLK at the foundation. RLC Pro AI is built on CLK 6.12, the upstream kernel.org latest long-term release. CLK delivers GPU hardware support ahead of traditional enterprise distributions.
• Day-one GPU hardware support. RLC Pro AI delivers support for current GPU accelerators from NVIDIA immediately, so organizations can deploy on the latest hardware without waiting for the OS to catch up.
• Consistent performance across every environment. RLC Pro AI delivers the same validated stack and the same performance profile on AWS, GCP, Azure, bare metal and sovereign on-premises infrastructure, across any GPU architecture.

"GPU compute is the most constrained and expensive resource in AI infrastructure today," said Bjorn Hovland, president of CIQ. "RLC Pro AI gives organizations more from the infrastructure they have already paid for, and those economics hold whether you are a startup running a single GPU node or an enterprise managing a thousand."

RLC Pro AI is now available for general availability, and soon through the CIQ Portal. RLC Pro AI is part of the Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro product family alongside RLC+ NVIDIA, RLC Pro and RLC Pro Hardened.

To learn more about RLC Pro AI and CIQ's complete Enterprise Linux portfolio, visit this blog "CIQ launches RLC Pro: redefining the Enterprise Linux standard".  Also, join Brian Dawson, Director of Product Management (RLC Pro Hardened, RLC Pro AI), for the upcoming webinar "RLC Pro AI: Maximize the throughput of your AI infra" on Thursday, April 2, 2026 at 11am PT / 2pm ET.

About CIQ

CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the leader in Enterprise Linux architecture for sovereign AI inferencing at scale. CIQ delivers a complete software infrastructure stack, from the operating system to orchestration, enabling enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide to deploy AI and high-performance computing workloads with strategic independence and control. CIQ's product portfolio includes the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC) family of enterprise operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball for cloud HPC orchestration, Warewulf Pro for cluster provisioning, and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. Together, these products provide the secure, performant infrastructure foundation that modern AI deployments demand.

For more information, visit ciq.com.

Media Contact:
Cristin Connelly
Cathey Communications for CIQ
cristin@cathey.co

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SOURCE CIQ