Kubernetes as AI Infrastructure: Google Cloud, llm-d, and the CNCF

At Google Cloud, serving the massive-scale needs of large foundation model builders and AI-native companies is at the forefront of our AI infrastructure strategy. As generative AI transitions to mission-critical production environments, these innovators require dynamic, relentlessly efficient infrastructure to overcome complex orchestration challenges and power an agentic future. To meet this moment, we are thrilled to announce that llm-d has officially been accepted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project. Google Cloud is proud to be a founding contributor to llm-d alongside Red Hat, IBM Research, CoreWeave, and NVIDIA, uniting around a clear, industry-defining vision: any model, any accelerator, any cloud. This contribution underscores Google’s long-standing leadership in open-source innovation. And under the trusted stewardship of the Linux Foundation, we are helping ensure that the future of distributed AI inference is built on open standards rather than walle