Schedule highlights global communities bridging cloud native infrastructure with AI stacks

Key Highlights

• Full schedule released for the inaugural co-location of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, OpenInfra Summit, and PyTorch Conference China 2026.
• Uniting cloud native, open infrastructure, and machine learning communities to standardize platforms for production-grade AI.
• The event brings together cloud native adopters, open infrastructure technologists, and machine learning experts.
• The event is taking place September 7–9, 2026, at the Shanghai International Convention Center.

SHANGHAI — JUNE 18, 2026 — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, the OpenInfra Foundation, which builds open source infrastructure communities, and the PyTorch Foundation, a community-driven hub for open source AI, today announced the full schedule for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China 2026, taking place September 7-9 at the Shanghai International Convention Center. This joint event marks the first time these three global open source communities have converged on a single stage.

This gathering addresses a structural shift in regional demand where enterprises are increasingly prioritizing the integration of foundational cloud native platforms with artificial intelligence (AI) model workflows. As the second-largest global contributor base for CNCF projects, China is a critical pillar of open source engineering.

“We are bringing the entire open source infrastructure stack together in a single event from OpenStack and Kata Containers to Kubernetes, PyTorch and vLLM,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF and OpenInfra Foundation. “AI workloads introduce new requirements at every layer of the environment with differentiated hardware and unique usage patterns. By bringing these communities together, we ensure open source software continues to drive the next wave of production-grade AI.” 

By combining three of the world’s most active open source projects together, the event leverages collaboration across converging developer pipelines. This integration allows organizations to streamline the entire stack—from the underlying virtualization and storage provided by OpenInfra through the orchestration and scheduling capabilities of Kubernetes up to the model training and inferencing frameworks of PyTorch—ensuring that AI workloads are not just experimental, but portable, scalable and operationally reliable.

“Modern AI depends on infrastructure that can support training, inference, agents and a growing diversity of AI accelerators,” said Mark Collier, executive director, PyTorch Foundation. “PyTorch and vLLM provide critical open source building blocks that help developers move from research to production across heterogeneous hardware, but delivering that at scale requires close collaboration with the cloud native and open infrastructure communities. This event brings those communities together in China to advance scalable, production-ready AI from accelerators to applications.” 

The two-day technical schedule features dozens of tracks curated by an independent program committee, emphasizing specialized domains such as AI infrastructure, platform engineering and hardware enablement. Keynote presentations and breakout sessions will dive into real-world case studies detailing how leading organizations scale production environments, implement runtime sandboxing, and maintain operational reliability. 

Featured tracks highlighted on this year’s agenda include:

AI + ML + Agentic AI + Data Systems

End-to-end AI lifecycle, from PyTorch model training and inferencing to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic workflows, connecting large language models to data and applications.

Highlighted Session: How Intsig Serves Billions of Document Scans: GPU Virtualization at Scale with HAMi – Xiao Zhang, dynamia.ai & Walter Duan, instig information co. ltd

AI + ML + Agentic AI + Data Systems track here.

Cloud Infrastructure + Virtualization + Storage

Foundational cloud infrastructure, including OpenStack and container runtimes, ensuring efficient, scalable provisioning of specialized hardware and storage for high-performance AI computing.

Highlighted Session: From Cloud to AI: How Kata Containers 4.0 Reinvents the Sandbox for the Agent Era – Fupan Li, Ant Group

View the full Cloud Infrastructure + Virtualization + Storage track here.

Platform Engineering + Cloud Native Architecture

Internal developer platforms and cloud native environments leverage Kubernetes to orchestrate accelerator-aware scheduling and unified multi-tenant architectures for AI workloads.

Highlighted Session: Scaling Digital Employees at China Merchants Bank in Production: A Controlled AI Agents Approach – Jiahang Xu, China Merchants Bank

View the full Platform Engineering + Cloud Native Architecture track here.

Dan Kohn Scholarship Program

The Dan Kohn Scholarship program offers registration and travel funding scholarships for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China. Application deadlines: 

• Scholarship application deadline: July 27, 8:59 PDT / July 27, 23:59 CST
• Travel Funding application deadline: July 6, 8:59 PDT / July 6, 23:59 CST

Sponsorships 

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China is made possible with support from our sponsors.

Companies interested in sponsoring KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China should submit a request to  sponsor@lfopensource.com. Signed contracts are due Friday, July 17. View the sponsorship prospectus.

Co-Located Events

AGNTCon + MCPCon China

AGNTCon + MCPCon China will also gather the global community of researchers, developers, and enterprises from September 6-7, the same week as the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + OpenInfra Summit + PyTorch Conference China. This event focuses on the complete agentic stack, including infrastructure, production systems, orchestration, and agent protocols like MCP.

OSPOlogy  + OSPO Summit 

The OSPOlogy & OSPO Summit examines the advancement of Open Source Program Office (OSPO) roles and corporate governance frameworks for open source within the context of agentic AI. Key discussion areas at the conference include the application of agentic AI in OSPO operations, governance of data and large language models (LLMs) and strategies for AI-enhanced software supply chains. Additionally, the event will address enterprise global expansion through open innovation mechanisms and strategic planning.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

About the Open Infrastructure Foundation

The OpenInfra Foundation builds communities who write open source infrastructure software that runs in production. Founded in 2012, the OpenInfra Foundation develops and supports open source infrastructure projects, including OpenStack, Kata Containers, StarlingX, and Zuul. With the support of over 110,000 individuals in 187 countries, the OpenInfra Foundation hosts open source projects and communities of practice, including infrastructure for AI, container native apps, edge computing and datacenter clouds. Join the OpenInfra movement: http://www.openinfra.org.

About PyTorch Foundation

The PyTorch Foundation is a community-driven hub supporting the open source PyTorch framework and a broader portfolio of innovative open source AI projects, including DeepSpeed, Helion, PyTorch, Ray, Safetensors, and vLLM. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the PyTorch Foundation provides a vendor-neutral, trusted home for collaboration across the AI lifecycle—from model training and inference, to domain-specific applications. Through open governance, strategic support, and a global contributor community, the PyTorch Foundation empowers developers, researchers, and enterprises to build and deploy AI at scale. Learn more at https://pytorch.org/foundation.

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Media Contact

Kaitlin Thornhill

The Linux Foundation

pr@cncf.io