Fortinet unveiled an integrated security solution developed with Nvidia that embeds firewall and zero-trust capabilities directly into accelerated AI infrastructure to protect high-performance data centers, without slowing down work.

As more organizations modernize data centers to support AI and latency-sensitive workloads, traditional host-based security tools can struggle to keep pace.

This has prompted Fortinet and Nvidia to collaborate on bringing isolated infrastructure acceleration into the compute stack, helping organizations keep pace with AI-scale traffic and maintain consistent protection across their environments.

The collaboration enables Fortinet’s FortiGate VM virtual firewall to run natively on Nvidia’s BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). By offloading core security functions, such as firewalling, network segmentation, and policy enforcement, the two companies say enterprises can secure AI factories, private clouds, and edge environments while maintaining performance.

“AI factories demand an entirely new class of secure, accelerated infrastructure," Kevin Deierling, SVP of networking at Nvidia, noted. "By running FortiGate VM directly on Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs, we’re extending the model of infrastructure-offloaded services to include advanced security.”

Nvidia said the integration also enables protection at scale without impacting GPU-intensive AI workloads.

Powered by FortiOS, the solution is said to support multitenant architectures and centralized management, and is aimed at enterprises, cloud providers, and telecom operators building AI-driven data centers. The update also simplifies private-cloud deployment and supports scalable, hardware-accelerated architectures.

Fortinet earlier this year, upgraded its service in line with Gartner’s exposure management framework. This deeper integration into Fortinet's AI-driven security operations center (SOC) platform allowed for expanded attack surface monitoring, adversary‑centric dark web intelligence, and built‑in security orchestration.

“CISOs and security teams are overwhelmed by growing attack surfaces and an endless stream of unprioritized alerts,” Nirav Shah, SVP of products and solutions at Fortinet, said at the time. “With the latest enhancements to FortiRecon, we’re giving organizations an attacker’s eye view of their internal and external exposures, backed by AI-powered threat intelligence … real-world validation, and automated response.”

Fortinet recently recognized a second FortiWeb firewall vulnerability that could allow attackers to execute code without authorization. The security vendor said it had “observed” the exploit being used, with a fix issued via software update in November.