SEATTLE – AI company F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) today announced an expanded collaboration with open source solutions company Red Hat that is designed to help enterprises deploy and scale AI applications.
Integration for the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform with Red Hat OpenShift AI is intended to help customers adopt AI faster and more securely, focusing on such use cases as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), secure model serving and scalable data ingestion.
“Enterprises are eager to harness the power of AI, but they face significant challenges in scaling and securing these applications,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer at F5. “Our collaboration with Red Hat aims to simplify this journey by providing integrated solutions that address performance, security, and observability needs, enabling organizations to realize tangible AI outcomes.”
This collaboration comes at a time when AI adoption is accelerating. According to F5’s 2025 State of Application Strategy Report, 96% of organizations are now deploying AI models, a significant increase from just 25% in 2023. Additionally, the report highlights that 72 percent of respondents aim to use AI to optimize application performance, while 59 percent focus on cost optimization and security enhancements.
To support these growing demands, F5 is collaborating with Red Hat to focus on the real-world building blocks enterprises need to operationalize AI. From securing data pipelines to optimizing inference performance, F5 solutions are tailored to help organizations deploy AI with confidence, speed, and control.
Areas of collaboration include:
- RAG and model serving at scale – F5 supports AI-powered applications on Red Hat OpenShift AI that combine large language models with private datasets, helping to ensure secure data flow, high GPU utilization, and fast response times.
- Big data movement and ingestion – With MinIO and F5 working in tandem on Red Hat OpenShift AI, customers can accelerate the ingestion of large datasets for training and inference.
- API-first AI security – F5 provides robust protection against evolving threats like prompt injection, model theft, and data leakage through its F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP and F5 BIG-IP solutions.
As part of its vision, F5 is committed to driving open source innovation through its collaboration with Red Hat. Red Hat OpenShift AI provides a modular, open platform for building and deploying AI applications across hybrid environments, while F5’s API Gateway and AI security capabilities are designed to integrate more seamlessly—without locking customers into a single cloud or toolset. With this collaboration, F5 is helping organizations take an open, flexible approach to AI infrastructure using Red Hat OpenShift AI.
“As AI becomes core to how businesses operate and compete, organizations need platforms that offer flexibility without compromising security,” said Joe Fernandes, Vice President and General Manager, AI Business Unit, Red Hat. “We believe the future of AI is open source, and Red Hat OpenShift AI, when used in combination with F5’s robust security and observability, gives organizations the necessary tools to build and scale AI applications with greater confidence, anywhere they choose to run them.”
The collaboration will be featured at this week’s Red Hat Summit 2025 (May 19–22 in Boston), where F5 and its partners will highlight real-world AI use cases—including secure model serving and RAG workloads—built on Red Hat OpenShift AI.
