The OpenPOWER Foundation advances the POWER architecture as an open standard — giving enterprises full sovereignty over their AI infrastructure, with no vendor lock-in, built-in AI acceleration, and the reliability the world's most demanding workloads require.
When your workload is regulated, mission-critical, or classified — you cannot outsource your compute stack to a foreign vendor's cloud. POWER gives you AI performance, memory scale, and hardware isolation entirely within your own infrastructure.
The Matrix Math Accelerator (MMA) is built directly into the POWER ISA — not a bolt-on GPU. Run LLM inference, fraud detection, and medical imaging models on your own hardware, inside your security boundary. Patient records and trading data never leave your data centre to reach an AI API.
ISA Specification →A 70B-parameter model requires ~140 GB of memory just to load — and conventional DIMM slots hit a hard ceiling. The Open Memory Interface (OMI) lets you scale memory capacity and bandwidth independently of the CPU, at DDR5 speeds, using hardware from any vendor. No proprietary memory bus, no single-source dependency.
OMI Specification →OpenCAPI connected FPGAs, HSMs, and AI accelerators directly to the POWER processor memory fabric — bypassing PCIe entirely, the same way NVIDIA's proprietary NVLink does. The specs are publicly archived. The FPGA reference designs are on GitHub. What's missing is an IP license grant from the original consortium founders — IBM, AMD/Xilinx, NVIDIA/Mellanox, Micron — to OPF members.
Support this initiative →POWER's Logical Partitioning (LPAR) is defined in the ISA itself — not a hypervisor policy. A trading system and a compliance engine on the same physical server are cryptographically separated at the processor level. Each partition has its own privilege domain, memory protection, and interrupt handling, enforced by the architecture. This is how POWER runs in central banks, payment networks, and classified government systems.
Technical Overview →POWER is the architecture of choice when the workload is enterprise AI, mission-critical data, or production data center infrastructure — open by design, proven at scale, and ready today.
AI has reshaped the compute landscape. POWER's open architecture and MMA instructions give developers and enterprises the freedom to optimize at every layer of the stack.
Mission-critical HPC requires a portable, production-ready stack. POWER delivers proven performance for scientific computing, financial modeling, and real-time analytics.
With a royalty-free ISA and a growing global membership, OpenPOWER is the only open architecture with a full enterprise software and hardware ecosystem ready for deployment today.
Decades of investment in POWER hardware, open firmware, and software mean you can deploy with confidence — no waiting for ecosystem maturity.
Whether you ship products on POWER today or want to start, there's a path for you — from co-developing next-generation silicon to deploying production infrastructure.
Extend your POWER infrastructure investment into the next generation. Shape the ISA roadmap, co-develop AI extensions, and access early silicon through the Enterprise Sovereignty Initiative.
A royalty-free, open architecture with decades of production validation. ESI gives hyperscalers a differentiated silicon path — UCIe chiplet interfaces, licensed IBM POWER IP, and governance rights over the roadmap.
Design OCP-compliant servers and accelerator trays with a fully open ISA at the core. No per-unit royalties, no black-box firmware — and a growing community of operators who already buy POWER-based infrastructure.
Start from open-source synthesizable POWER ISA cores (Microwatt, A2I, A2O) or license IBM POWER chiplets via ESI. Either path gives you a production-proven ISA without royalty entanglement or vendor dependency.
Not sure which track fits? Start here.
Talk to the OpenPOWER team →The open commons every POWER implementation builds on — synthesizable cores, firmware stacks, and active ISA development. Free to all, governed by the community. View all open source →
A fully open source, synthesizable POWER ISA soft-core that runs Linux on FPGA — and has been taped out as a real ASIC via the OpenROAD toolchain. The reference implementation for the open POWER ISA.
An open source out-of-order POWER ISA processor core — a commercial-grade design available to the community. Being updated to full POWER ISA compliance in collaboration with POWER Commons and LibrePOWER.
Active ISA development through the AI Special Integration Group — defining new matrix, vector, and inference extensions to the POWER ISA that keep the architecture at the frontier of AI accelerated computing.
Skiboot (OPAL), Petitboot, and Heads — a complete open firmware stack from power-on through secure boot. No proprietary blobs, no management engines. Full transparency from first instruction to OS handoff.
Open hardware reference designs for POWER-based systems — from workstations to rack servers — developed collaboratively by OpenPOWER member organizations and available to the broader community.
An open AI inference SoC built on the POWER ISA — combining 32 AI accelerator cores with a 4× Microwatt control cluster. Fully open from ISA to GDSII.
A fully open POWER ISA compliant processor core — royalty-free, auditable, and available for sovereign chip design programs worldwide.
A consortium program enabling regulated industries to co-fund and co-own sovereign AI compute infrastructure — auditable hardware, open firmware, no vendor lock-in.
Explore the full OpenPOWER Foundation GitHub organization — specifications, tooling, reference implementations, and community projects.
The OpenPOWER Foundation is expanding its technical working groups to address emerging compute workloads including AI inference, edge computing, and open BMC development...
Community contributions across firmware, Linux kernel, and toolchain continue to strengthen the POWER10 open source software stack for enterprise and HPC deployments...
Hundreds of developers, researchers, and hardware engineers gathered to share advances in POWER architecture, open firmware, and the growing AI acceleration ecosystem...
Get the latest OpenPOWER news, technical updates, and community announcements.
