Brian Dawson from CIQ discusses the need for a composable AI infrastructure stack, advocating for an "AI kit" approach over fixed "AI factories." He highlights that the AI technical evolution cycle is moving faster than ever, with every layer of the stack, including hardware, evolving on rapid cycles (one to three months or within a year). This rapid pace pressures organizations to quickly move from research to production, often leading them to adopt rigid "AI factory" solutions. However, Dawson warns that tying into a fixed stack risks locking into something that could become obsolete or antiquated in a matter of months, stressing the importance of building for flexibility.
Brian Dawson, leading product strategy at CIQ, explains that the company is behind Rocky Linux, founded by Gregory Kurtzer, who also co-founded CentOS and created products like Fuzzball and AppTainer. CIQ's expertise is rooted in HPC and Linux, providing a unique approach to assembling the AI stack. Their core thesis is that existing infrastructure is unprepared for AI's demands, necessitating a modern IT stack. Challenges include rising enterprise Linux costs (despite Linux running 95% of AI workloads), increased security criticality for valuable AI data, and immense spending on GPU hardware that often sits idle due to difficulties in setting up the surrounding stack. Operations are fragmented, with separate solutions for traditional fleets and GPU nodes. CIQ proposes a new hybrid-first integrated stack, built on a "homogeneous foundation that can be deployed to support heterogeneous use cases," to address these issues, allowing flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in through open-source components and workload-tuned variants.
The presentation emphasizes the critical, often forgotten, role of the OS layer beneath the GPUs. Dawson explains that the OS, particularly the kernel, controls access to all expensive resources, enabling the workload layer to tap into the compute layer. While some control is shifting towards the GPU, the kernel remains fundamental for tasks like turning devices on and off, configuring them, and managing data streaming from storage. An "AI kit" from CIQ is designed to be built from necessary layers, evolving with changing compute (bare metal to Kubernetes) and supporting diverse performance-intensive computing workloads and heterogeneous infrastructure, including on-prem, cloud, VPC, and various processor architectures (XPUs, NPUs, DPUs, TPUs, NVIDIA, AMD). This flexible approach ensures that the infrastructure can adapt to the fast-paced, diverse demands of the AI landscape, providing a stable base while supporting underlying changes.

Presented by Bryan Dawson, Product Manager, CIQ. Recorded live at AI Infrastructure Field Day 6 in San Jose, CA, on November 4, 2026. Watch the entire presentation at https://techfieldday.com/appearance/ciq-presents-at-ai-infrastructure-field-day-6/ or visit https://techfieldday.com/event/AIIFD6/ or https://ciq.com for more information.