Fortinet expands NVIDIA tie-up to secure enterprise AI

Fortinet has expanded its FortiAIGate integration with NVIDIA to secure enterprise AI deployments across data centres, cloud systems and edge environments.

The integration combines Fortinet's AI security product with NVIDIA's AI platforms and software to protect AI workloads, data and autonomous agents in real time. Designed for inline deployment between applications and AI models, it gives organisations visibility into AI traffic while allowing deployments to remain within their own infrastructure where needed.

At the centre of the announcement is FortiAIGate, which applies security controls to large language models at runtime and to surrounding systems, including AI agents and MCP servers. It monitors inputs and outputs, manages model traffic and blocks threats such as prompt injection and data leakage.

Fortinet is positioning the joint offering around what it calls zero-trust AI environments. In practice, that means extending identity, access and inspection controls to AI systems so prompts, responses and model interactions can be checked against policy before data leaves a system or an action is carried out.

FortiAIGate also records prompts and responses linked to suspicious incidents, which can help customers investigate misuse and support governance requirements. The focus reflects growing concern among large organisations over how to keep generative AI systems within internal policy and regulatory boundaries.

Deployment options

The product will be available across several deployment models, including on-premises environments, public cloud, hybrid systems and edge locations. It will be offered as a GPU-based appliance for data centres, as a virtual appliance and as containers on NVIDIA-Certified Systems.

That range is likely to appeal to large businesses and public sector organisations that want to keep some AI processing and data within national borders or their own infrastructure. Data sovereignty has become more prominent as companies weigh the use of third-party AI providers against internal hosting and governance needs.

According to Fortinet, its self-hosted deployment modes are intended to help organisations develop, deploy and govern AI using their own infrastructure, data and workforce. The company said this could help users meet local legal and security requirements while reducing reliance on external AI providers.

GPU focus

A key part of the collaboration is the use of NVIDIA hardware and software across the stack. FortiAIGate is accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and NVIDIA Hopper, together with NVIDIA Dynamo, an open-source distributed inference-serving framework.

The setup is intended to deliver AI security with lower latency than traditional CPU-based approaches. Fortinet argues that shifting more of the processing burden to GPUs can reduce hardware footprint and energy use while freeing CPU resources for other workloads.

Another feature highlighted in the announcement is support for multitenant environments. FortiAIGate uses NVIDIA virtualisation methods to isolate AI workloads and datasets on shared hardware, including NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU, which divides a single physical GPU into separate instances.

This is most relevant in larger enterprise and AI data centre environments, where multiple teams, applications or customers may share infrastructure. Workload isolation is central to reducing the risk that one service interferes with another or gains access to data outside its boundary.

Executive views

John Whittle, chief operating officer at Fortinet, said the partnership responds to a broad shift in enterprise technology priorities.

"Enterprises everywhere are racing to adopt AI, and security has become a critical enabler of that innovation," Whittle said.

"Together with NVIDIA, we're delivering a solution that helps organizations secure and optimize AI deployments while maintaining performance, controlling costs, and meeting data sovereignty requirements. FortiAIGate combines Fortinet's AI-driven Security Fabric with NVIDIA's high-performance computing and AI factories to stop threats, from malicious prompts to data exfiltration, without disrupting AI workflows."

Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI platforms at NVIDIA, linked the move to the spread of autonomous AI agents in business systems.

"The accelerating shift toward autonomous AI agents is creating unprecedented demand for secure, high-performance enterprise computing platforms," Boitano said.

"By integrating its FortiAIGate solution with the full-stack NVIDIA AI platform, Fortinet provides zero-trust security and real-time governance, reducing threat exposure by shortening response times."

The announcement highlights how cybersecurity suppliers are adapting existing zero-trust and governance models for AI systems, particularly as companies move from experimentation to operational use of large language models and autonomous software agents.

Fortinet said FortiAIGate is intended to help organisations scale AI use while applying policy controls, monitoring model interactions and protecting sensitive data across cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.