OAAX (Open AI Accelerator eXchange) is an open standard and reference implementation for running AI models across heterogeneous hardware accelerators — CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, VPUs, and emerging XPUs — with a unified runtime interface.
OAAX is a Linux Foundation AI & Data project, initiated by Network Optix, focused on defining a common runtime and model exchange layer that bridges AI frameworks, toolchains, and hardware vendors.
AI acceleration is fragmented. Each hardware vendor exposes different APIs, runtimes, and model formats — creating silos and duplication.
OAAX aims to unify the interface between AI frameworks and hardware accelerators by:
- Defining a standard runtime API that all AI accelerators can implement.
- Providing toolchains that convert models (e.g. ONNX) into AI accelerator-specific model packages.
- Enabling developers to run the same model across diverse AI accelerators without code changes.
- CPUs
- Intel GPUs & NPUs
- NVIDIA GPUs
- DEEPX M1 and H1
- HAILO-8 and HAILO-8L
- For general information about OAAX, visit its website at https://www.oaax.org/
- To learn about which AI accelerators are compliant with the OAAX standard, visit this page: Compliant AI Accelerators
- To learn how to deploy on a compliant AI accelerator, visit the tech docs at https://docs.oaax.org/ and go to the page associated with the desired AI accelerator.
- To improve an existing runtime/toolchain implementation or implement a bug fix, visit the relevant repository on Github's repositories list at https://github.com/orgs/OAAX-standard/repositories to get started.