diff --git a/CMakeLists.txt b/CMakeLists.txt
index 784fea05ea734..d47f1bb305a96 100644
--- a/CMakeLists.txt
+++ b/CMakeLists.txt
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.21)
+cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.26)
 
 project(vllm_extensions LANGUAGES CXX)
 
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 26d963aa51099..ba0e10241ca2d 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 [build-system]
 # Should be mirrored in requirements-build.txt
 requires = [
-    "cmake>=3.21",
+    "cmake>=3.26",
     "ninja",
     "packaging",
     "setuptools >= 49.4.0",
diff --git a/requirements-build.txt b/requirements-build.txt
index d0f677fd344ed..bea55d930ab25 100644
--- a/requirements-build.txt
+++ b/requirements-build.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 # Should be mirrored in pyproject.toml
-cmake>=3.21
+cmake>=3.26
 ninja
 packaging
 setuptools>=49.4.0
diff --git a/requirements-common.txt b/requirements-common.txt
index 5078a65f80f15..1876ab3c7d48b 100644
--- a/requirements-common.txt
+++ b/requirements-common.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,3 @@
-cmake >= 3.21
-ninja  # For faster builds.
 psutil
 sentencepiece  # Required for LLaMA tokenizer.
 numpy < 2.0.0