Today, as the industry's top minds gather at NVIDIA GTC Washington, D.C., a clear message is emerging: Artificial intelligence is no longer an experiment; it's the new engine for market leadership. To win in this new era, leaders can champion a new strategic asset: AI Factory. The AI Factory as defined by NVIDIA, is a specialized, purpose-built computing infrastructure designed to function as a manufacturing plant for intelligence at scale, differentiating it from a general-purpose data center. This approach transforms the varied technical AI initiatives and complex assets required to deliver AI at scale, into a powerful competitive business advantage running on a secure and efficient infrastructure.
However, this new engine for market leadership requires a fundamental shift in how we approach security. As enterprises accelerate their efforts to build AI Factories, the sheer scale of data, the speed of AI workloads, and an entirely new threat landscape requires a fresh approach to security that leverages the traditional while bringing new ideas to counter new risks. A comprehensive, secure-by-design architecture is no longer optional, but a critical imperative to protect this new foundation of your business. Our Palo Alto Networks platform approach is the industry’s most comprehensive AI security solution, unifying visibility with proactive detection and real-time protection for the entire AI Factory.
Palo Alto Networks has teamed up with NVIDIA to create a robust solution to secure the future of AI Factories. At its core, Palo Alto Networks Prisma® AIRS™, optimized for NVIDIA BlueField, delivers robust, zero trust protection for the entire AI lifecycle. This integration provides enterprises the confidence to innovate and transform their business, ensuring their underlying infrastructure is built on a secure foundation.
Combined with NVIDIA BlueField, the accelerated computing platform for cybersecurity enables a fundamental shift from perimeter-based defenses to a proactive, secure-by-design architecture. By installing distributed zero trust security functions directly on the data processing unit (DPU), this integration delivers agentless, penalty-free protection with real-time workload threat detection, ensuring peak AI performance and securing the AI factory from the ground up.
Stated by Meeeah Rajavel, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, Palo Alto Networks:
The AI Factory is the new engine for value creation, and securing it is a board-level imperative. Our collaboration with NVIDIA isn't just about integrating technology; it's about delivering a new security architecture for the AI era. We are embedding trust directly into the infrastructure, giving leaders the confidence to harness the full power of AI without hesitation.
Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security on NVIDIA BlueField has been validated on the NVIDIA RTX PRO Server, accelerating the enterprise journey from strategy to deployment. This universal acceleration platform provides a seamless path for enterprises to shift from general-purpose clusters to AI factory infrastructure, while avoiding costly and time-consuming data center overhauls.
As we secure enterprise AI adoption with NVIDIA BlueField-3 today, we look ahead to the newly announced NVIDIA BlueField-4 next year. It will bring breakthrough compute power, 800 Gb/s throughput, advanced security and multitenant capabilities to meet the extreme performance demands of gigascale AI factories.
David Reber, Chief Security Officer at NVIDIA said:
Protecting the AI factories that are transforming enterprise business and operations is mission critical. Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS on NVIDIA BlueField delivers real-time visibility and enforcement within the AI factory, uniting security and performance to help enterprises accelerate AI innovation.
The Palo Alto Networks platform approach to securing the NVIDIA AI Factory provides comprehensive, end-to-end protection across the entire AI lifecycle shown in the diagram below.
Figure 1 illustrates a platform anchored by Prisma AIRS accelerated on NVIDIA BlueField, using Strata Cloud Manager to simplify workload security and the Cortex® product family to monitor and protect the AI Factory end to end.
The leaders who will define the next decade are those who view the AI Factory, not as a cost center, but as the core engine for innovation. Securing this engine demands an equally modern approach, built on the fundamental principles of zero trust. The Palo Alto Networks platform, deeply integrated with NVIDIA BlueField, embeds security into the very operating system of your AI infrastructure. This ensures that your greatest asset is also your most protected one, empowering you to scale with confidence and lead without compromise.
This marks a pivotal step in our commitment. Together with NVIDIA, we are shaping the future of AI security with the innovation and leadership needed to protect AI factories at scale.
Check out the Palo Alto Networks and NVIDIA Joint Solution Brief to learn more.
Key Takeaways (3+)
- The AI Factory Is a Board-Level Imperative: The AI Factory, whether built in-house or leveraged as an outside service, is no longer a technical project but a strategic asset essential for delivering business outcomes. Framing your AI resources as part of the cohesive AI Factory, provides the visibility and allows security to accelerate the use of AI.
- Legacy Security Is Obsolete for AI: Palo Alto Networks platform approach provides visibility and protection across your entire AI lifecycle, which includes the applications you build, the AI models you use, the agents that perform tasks, and the data that flows through them. This ensures you can deploy bravely and innovate with confidence, knowing your most valuable AI investments are secure.
- A New Security Architecture for the AI Era: Our collaboration with NVIDIA delivers a new paradigm for securing the AI Factory. By embedding Prisma® AIRS™ on NVIDIA BlueField, we provide foundational zero trust protection without compromising performance, enabling you to innovate with confidence.