Qualcomm subsidiary Arduino has announced the VENTUNO Q, a new single-board computer that ships with Ubuntu pre-installed.
This isn’t a board aimed at casual makers or tech tinkerers bored with their Raspberry Pi, but catering to the demands of AI workloads at the edge: robotics, industrial automation, computer vision.
The Ventuno Q is built around Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ-8275 processor with CPU, GPU and NPU, which delivers 40 TOPS of AI compute to run large language models, visual language models and computer vision workloads on-device.
It comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM – double what you get on the comparable Jetson Orin Nano Super – and 64GB of eMMC storage. If that’s not enough, there’s an M.2 slot for NVMe expansion. On the connectivity side: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3 and 2.5Gb Ethernet.
The software-side centres on the Arduino App Lab, a development environment that lets you work with Arduino sketches, Python, and pre-built AI model integrations from a single interface. The “sell” is that you can go from unboxing this to running AI inference easily, i.e., sans friction.
If you’d rather work with standard Linux tooling, like VS Code, Docker, Python, etc, you can; App Lab is optional. The Ventuno Q is also compatible with Arduino UNO shields, Raspberry Pi HATs, and Modulino nodes via a regular 40-pin GPIO header.
Ubuntu (at) Edge
Canonical × Qualcomm
Ubuntu is often judged by its desktop efforts, but it’s easy to forget that this is a Linux distro used at scale. Canonical has been bullish on making Ubuntu the de-facto operating system for edge, embedded computing and robotics developers – a move that’s paying off.
Last year, Canonical announced certified images of Ubuntu 24.04 for Dragonwing IoT devices as part of a partnership with Qualcomm. Now, with support for the Ventuno Q, it’s aiding those working in the industrial AI space too.
Cindy Goldberg, Canonical’s VP of Silicon Alliances, says: “By providing a reliable Ubuntu foundation for VENTUNO Q, we ensure that a successful prototype can scale into a securely-designed industrial solution with 10 years of security maintenance.”
While Fabio Violante, Vice President and General Manager of Arduino adds that the combination of hardware and Ubuntu OS will enable “AI-driven decisions to be translated into physical action instantly”.
I don’t imagine most of you reading this site are clamouring to buy one (not that there’s a release date or pricing yet), but the board is on show at Embedded World 2026 (10–12 March in Germany) and you can sign up to get availability alerts on the Arduino website.
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