Fortanix Announces Confidential AI for Enterprise Grade Kubernetes Workloads on CNCF® Confidential Containers (CoCo)

Fortanix® Inc. , a global leader in data and AI security and pioneer of Confidential Computing, today announced support for CNCF Confidential Containers (CoCo) in Fortanix Confidential AI, enabling organizations to run AI workloads on Kubernetes inside hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), on confidential CPUs and GPUs. Enterprises keep the speed and agility of containers while protecting sensitive data, AI models, agents, and applications in use, so they can support their regulatory compliance efforts, scale AI across the business, and adopt frontier AI without compromising data privacy or intellectual property.

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Confidential AI is a critical need in the industry today and a strong ecosystem of industry leaders is collaborating to advance open innovation and help enterprises securely adopt AI at scale.

Regulated industries, including financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and government, need to run AI on sensitive and sovereign data without exposing that data or their models to the infrastructure operator. New research from Fortanix and Atomik Research underscores the challenge: while 93% of AI leaders understand that traditional encryption does not protect data while it is being processed by AI, only half can fully verify that protection is in place during inference. Fortanix Confidential AI isolates workloads inside hardware-based TEEs and uses attestation to verify each environment before any data or model is unlocked. That same trusted environment lets enterprises run proprietary models from frontier AI labs on-premises or in air-gapped environments, next to their most sensitive data, without putting the model owner's intellectual property at risk.

“Containers are how the world ships applications, and in the AI era, they're what makes AI scalable. But moving AI into containers doesn’t change the threat,” said Anand Kashyap, co-founder and CEO of Fortanix. “Models, agents and applications still touch an organization’s most sensitive data and intellectual property, and each one needs zero-trust security, including while it runs. That’s why we built Fortanix Confidential AI support for Confidential Containers: so teams can deploy containers into confidential computing environments with one click across supported hardware and Kubernetes platforms, with every workload verified before even a single key is released.”

From Open Foundation to Running Confidential AI at Enterprise Scale

CoCo has advanced Confidential AI by enabling AI workloads to run inside TEEs on Kubernetes. As these AI-powered applications move into production, organizations need security that holds up at scale and under audit. To help meet that need, Fortanix is developing open-source plugins to CoCo, connecting Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager for attestation and Fortanix Data Security Manager for secure key release. Working within CoCo's standard workflows, the plugins verify that every container is genuine, runs inside a TEE, and meets security policy before any keys are released. Built for production at scale, the Fortanix AI security platform delivers:

• High availability: Clustered deployment designed so key release never becomes a single point of failure.
• Enterprise support: SLA-backed, 24x7 global support from the team that built the platform.
• Certified security: FIPS 140-2 Level 3, SOC 2 Type 2, and ISO/IEC 27001.
• Proven adoption: Trusted by governments, banks, healthcare providers, technology and retail leaders, and cybersecurity companies.

With this release, developers can deploy Confidential AI workloads on Kubernetes at the speed the business demands, while leaders gain assurance that security is built in from the start and can take AI to production with confidence.

"Attestation is a process. Trust is an operation," said Anuj Jaiswal, Chief Product Officer at Fortanix. "CoCo has proven that confidential AI works in open source. Enterprises now need it to run reliably in production. Fortanix Confidential AI protects both the model owner's intellectual property and the enterprise data, and neither is exposed to the other or to the infrastructure provider. With attestation and key management in one platform, teams can adopt standard CoCo without building the trust layer themselves."

“Enterprises need data to stay protected while running models and agents, and labs need the same privacy to protect their models — NVIDIA Confidential Computing keeps both data and models private,” said John Fanelli, vice president, Enterprise Software, NVIDIA. “Through open source collaboration with the CNCF Confidential Containers community, Fortanix is building on open standards for attestation and secure key release at production scale.”

Closing the Core Security Gap in AI

Encryption protects data at rest and in transit. During AI inference without Confidential Computing, model weights and sensitive data must be decrypted in CPU and GPU memory, where they can be exposed to privileged administrators, cloud operators, and anyone with access to the infrastructure. Fortanix Confidential AI closes this gap. Before any sensitive workload runs, it verifies that both the underlying hardware and the AI workload are genuine and unaltered. Encryption keys are released only after verification succeeds, and only inside the protected environment.

Because the CPU and GPU are verified together through composite attestation, the full execution path is trusted, not just a part of it. Encryption keys stay within Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM), a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 HSM and key management solution, which is widely adopted by global enterprises in regulated industries and the public sector. Fortanix Confidential Computing Manager (CCM) provides hardware-rooted attestation for the open-source CoCo runtime. The Confidential AI solution deploys as SaaS, on-premises, or fully air-gapped, so regulated, sovereign, and disconnected environments can adopt Confidential AI without depending on the cloud.

Confidential AI is a critical need in the industry today and a strong ecosystem of industry leaders including, NVIDIA, Alpha Compute , AMD , Cisco , CrowdStrike , Deepgram , Dell, Eleven Labs , Fujitsu , Gnani , H2O.ai , HPE , Intel , Klique , Personal AI , Rafay , Red Hat , Resemble AI , Spectro Cloud , Supermicro, Technology Innovation Institute (TII), TELUS and VAST Data are collaborating to advance open innovation and help enterprises securely adopt AI at scale.

Fortanix Confidential AI for CoCo is available now. More information is available at https://www.fortanix.com/platform/confidential-ai and our blog post .

Attending NVIDIA GTC Berlin? Visit Fortanix at Booth 7017, October 20–22, for a live demo of Confidential AI running on supported NVIDIA GPUs with Confidential Computing enabled and see how you can protect sensitive data and model IP while AI is running. Stop by the booth to discuss your architecture with our team or book a personalized demo in advance.

About Fortanix

Fortanix is the global leader in data and AI security and a pioneer of Confidential Computing , delivering a unified platform to protect sensitive data, AI models, and applications across on-premises and multi-cloud environments—at rest, in transit, and in use. Built on hardware-enforced security, Fortanix enables workloads to run in tamper-proof, isolated enclaves, protecting against data leakage, model extraction, and unauthorized access, even from privileged insiders.

As enterprises scale modern AI factories, Fortanix provides a Confidential AI foundation built on attestation-based trust, secure key release, and zero-trust enforcement. This ensures AI systems remain verifiable, auditable, and trustworthy—while enabling crypto agility and long-term resilience through post-quantum cryptography (PQC) .

Trusted by leading enterprises and sovereign entities in highly regulated industries and powered by an industry-standard approach to Confidential Computing supported by leading technology providers, including Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, Fortanix enables organizations to safely use sensitive data and drive AI adoption with confidence.

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