CIQ
Category: AI Infrastructure
CIQ is the commercial sponsor of Rocky Linux. It builds a sovereign AI and HPC infrastructure stack that runs from the Linux kernel up to Fuzzball, its orchestration platform for running open-weight models and agents on customer-owned GPUs. CIQ was founded in 2020. The company is led by Gregory Kurtzer. Based in Reno, United States. Total funding raised: $28M. Latest round: Venture Round. Key investors include Two Bear Capital, IAG Capital Partners, OpenDrives, Battle Born Venture, Rho Capital Partners.
- Founded
- 2020
- Headquarters
- Reno, United States
- Total funding
- $28M
Value proposition
Enterprises can run production AI inference, agents and HPC workloads on infrastructure they already own (on-premises or cloud) without building a new stack. Models, weights and data stay under the customer's control and governance.
Products and solutions
Fuzzball (sovereign AI/HPC orchestration). Version 4.3 adds one-command deployment of validated open-weight models (GPT-OSS, Llama 4, Gemma 4, Qwen3-Coder, Mistral, Nemotron 3), vLLM serving, LiteLLM gateways, in-cluster coding agents and a retrieval service. Other products: Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC+, RLC Pro, RLC Pro AI, RLC Pro Hardened), CIQ Linux Kernel, CIQ Bridge
Unique value
CIQ supports the whole stack, from the kernel to the orchestrator. It is built on Rocky Linux, which runs on 2.75M+ instances. RLC is the first Enterprise Linux distribution authorized to ship the full NVIDIA AI software and networking stack.
Target customer
Enterprises, national laboratories, federal agencies, research institutions and AI-native organizations that run GPU, HPC and Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
Industries served
HPC/scientific computing, government and national labs, telecommunications, media and entertainment, oil and gas, financial services, retail, and enterprise AI.
Technology advantage
Founder-led open-source pedigree (CentOS, Rocky Linux, Warewulf, Singularity/Apptainer) gives CIQ a large installed base. Fuzzball is API-first, container-native, rootless and unprivileged, and handles heterogeneous NVIDIA and AMD GPU fleets with health-aware scheduling and scale-to-zero inference. It deploys to AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, Azure and on-premises clusters.
How they differentiate
CIQ sells a vertically integrated, open-source-rooted stack (OS, provisioning, containers, orchestration) aimed at HPC-style GPU workloads and sovereign/private AI. Competitors typically offer either a Kubernetes-centric platform or the OS layer alone.
Main competitors
Red Hat (RHEL / OpenShift AI), NVIDIA Run:ai, SUSE / AlmaLinux (Enterprise Linux)
Key partnerships
NVIDIA (licensing of the CUDA, DOCA-OFED and full AI software stack in Rocky Linux from CIQ), AMD (Instinct GPU / ROCm ecosystem), Google Cloud (first-party Rocky Linux support), Sandia National Laboratories (Fuzzball HPC 2.0 work), Open Enterprise Linux Association with Oracle and SUSE, deployment targets on AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud and CoreWeave.
Notable customers
Sandia National Laboratories
Major milestones
Apr 2020: founded. Dec 2020–Jun 2021: Rocky Linux created and shipped. 2022: Google Cloud first-party partnership. May 2022: $26M Series A. 2023: co-founded OpenELA. May 2025: RLC for AI. Nov 2025: first Enterprise Linux authorized to ship the full NVIDIA AI stack. Oct 2026: Fuzzball 4.3 GA.
Growth metrics
2.75M+ active Rocky Linux instances (EPEL telemetry); about 250K average monthly downloads; the company states 90% of the Fortune 100 use CIQ-supported technologies.
Market positioning
Positioned as the enterprise Linux and sovereign AI infrastructure provider for organizations moving AI inference onto private infrastructure, building on the Rocky Linux community base.
Geographic focus
Global, with a core in North America; it also has a regional office for the Middle East.
About Gregory Kurtzer
Ex-Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (HPC/infrastructure); co-founder of CentOS; creator of Warewulf and Singularity (now Apptainer); founder of Rocky Linux and the RESF; co-founder of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (2023); Holy Names University.
Latest news about CIQ
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Official website: https://ciq.com