40 Years of Firmware, One Open Source Tree for AI Data Centers

For more than four decades, AMI has written the firmware that boots, manages, and secures the world's servers. That kind of longevity in a business long defined by proprietary code makes the company's latest strategic shift notable. On a recent episode of The Control Plane, Allyson Klein, CEO of TechArena, sat down with Zachary Bobroff, VP of product management at AMI, a Lattice Company, to talk about why open source has become central to AMI's firmware strategy, and how the company is untangling what he calls firmware's "five-headed hydra."

As VP of product management, Zachary spends much of his time gathering requirements from AMI's two core customer bases: system manufacturers, including OEMs and ODMs, and the hyperscalers that deploy that hardware at scale. Neoclouds and other large-scale consumers of systems are increasingly entering the conversation too, he said, reshaping how the industry defines its firmware needs.

Historically, OEMs owned platform architecture, Zachary explained. As hyperscalers rose to prominence, influence moved first to ODMs and then to the hyperscalers themselves. Now, with end customers looking to take control of firmware and vertically integrate it, open source has become the best way to reach that goal. In Zachary’s words, "Open source is the best path to innovation, ecosystem adoption, and having everybody on the same page."

OpenBMC and One Tree

AMI has increased its contributions to OpenBMC, the Linux Foundation project that originated at IBM as a lighter-weight alternative to full-featured BMCs. AMI has also built MegaRAC OneTree Community Edition, its own distribution of OpenBMC. "Our OneTree product is OpenBMC at its core, and you can kind of view it as a distribution of OpenBMC. This is a tagged, well-validated version of OpenBMC. We're testing it across multiple silicon vendors, multiple ODM platforms and OEM platforms,” Zachary said.

Customers who need more can still license AMI's proprietary version, which provides long-term direct customer support and SLAs, plus IP packages for advanced needs.

The name OneTree comes from a direct response to a problem Zachary discussed at a recent OpenBMC meetup AMI co-hosted with Meta: the proliferation of firmware forks across silicon vendors and manufacturers, a challenge he calls a five-headed hydra.

Given finite engineering resources, it’s not scalable to continue to work across these multiple trees. “What we've done is take information from those different forks and merge them back into a common tree today,” he said.

Security and Sovereign Data

Security threads through all of it. "We've taken a strong approach to security by putting out advisories to our customers and going through the effort of having third-party audits of our code base," he said, pointing to AMI's annual OCP SAFE audits of its community edition release through the Open Compute Project.

Sovereign data requirements are adding another layer of complexity. As new regional cloud providers emerge to meet local data rules, local players are staring to emerge within these regions, and many are encountering firmware at scale for the first time.

AMI backs its open source strategy with a long-term customer relationship that spans the entire hardware life cycle. "We work pre power on, well before silicon is available, all the way through 10 years to 15 years after launch," Zachary said, positioning AMI as an economy-of-scale partner that spares customers the cost of building their own in-house firmware teams.

For developers who want in, Zachary pointed to AMI's developer portal for MegaRAC OneTree Community Edition, its community portal, upcoming OpenBMC meetups, and the Open Compute Project as entry points. "We were very open to having discussions with customers and industry experts," he added.

Key Takeaway

AMI's open source pivot is a direct response to real fragmentation risk, as multiple forks across silicon paths and rising sovereign requirements threaten to make firmware unmanageable at data center scale. By feeding its OneTree CE distribution back into OpenBMC and layering proprietary IP packages on top where customers need them, AMI is betting that a single, secure, well-audited tree beats a forest of one-off forks. With AI infrastructure evolving from servers to racks to pods to rows to rooms, that bet on convergence looks well timed.

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