Canonical to distribute AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in Ubuntu

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Dec 10, 2025,
updated Dec 12, 2025

Quoting: Canonical to distribute AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in Ubuntu —

Canonical is pleased to announce an expanded collaboration with AMD to package and maintain AMD ROCm™ software directly in Ubuntu. AMD ROCm is an open software ecosystem to enable hardware-accelerated AI/ML and HPC workloads on AMD Instinct™ and AMD Radeon™ GPUs, simplifying the deployment of AI infrastructure with long term support from Canonical.

Canonical has formed a dedicated team of engineers to package the AMD ROCm software libraries to streamline installation, support, and long-term maintenance on Ubuntu. Canonical will also submit these packages for consideration in Debian.

This work will simplify the delivery of AMD AI solutions in data centers, workstations, laptops, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and edge environments. AMD ROCm software will be available as a dependency for any Debian package, snap, or Docker image (OCI) build. Performance fixes and security patches will automatically be available to production systems.

This collaboration aims to make AMD ROCm software available in Ubuntu starting with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, with updates available in every subsequent Ubuntu release.

Read on

Also:

• Ubuntu 26.04 Includes AMD ROCm in Official Repository (Like CUDA)

  The news mirrors September’s NVIDIA CUDA announcement, when Canonical said it would package CUDA tools in the official Ubuntu repositories, negating multi-step installation hurdles for developers to get up and running with GPU-accelerated AI/ML tasks on Ubuntu.

  Now, AMD already provide ROCm for Ubuntu directly via its own website/repo. What this news means is packaging and maintenance duties shift over to Canonical, which has created a dedicated engineering team to shoulder the task.

  And yes: it’s committed to long-term maintenance of the packages on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and says it will “also submit these packages for consideration in Debian”, which is the kind of share-the-love-fest we er, love to see.

  ROCm (and related tools) will be a simple apt install rocm away on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and security updates and bug fixes will come through the usual update channels (no additional repos or manual dependency management required).

Marius:

• Canonical to Package and Distribute AMD ROCm within Ubuntu’s Repositories

  Ubuntu maker Canonical will package and distribute the AMD ROCm software stack within Ubuntu’s repositories to enable hardware-accelerated AI/ML and HPC workloads.

A couple more:

• Canonical Prepares Native AMD ROCm Support for Ubuntu

  This work will simplify the delivery of AMD AI solutions in data centers, workstations, laptops, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and edge environments. AMD ROCm software will be available as a dependency for any Debian package, snap, or Docker image (OCI) build. Performance fixes and security patches will automatically be available to production systems.

• Canonical to package AMD ROCm directly in Ubuntu