Akamai announced an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to embed Zero Trust security directly into AI factory infrastructure, enabling organizations to protect AI workloads, data, context memory, and autonomous agents without sacrificing performance. The integration combines Akamai Guardicore Segmentation with NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX and the NVIDIA DOCA software platform, creating an infrastructure-level security framework designed for the growing demands of agentic AI environments.
The partnership aims to address a growing challenge facing enterprises as AI factories become critical operational assets. Traditional security tools often introduce performance overhead that can hinder AI workloads. By shifting workload-aware segmentation and security enforcement into the infrastructure layer, the joint solution enables real-time protection while preserving GPU, CPU, and storage performance.
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides visibility across hybrid environments, including data centers, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, and edge systems. The platform continuously maps workload interactions and defines security policies based on workload identity, application context, and runtime behavior rather than static network configurations. This approach enables organizations to identify abnormal activity and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data throughout the AI lifecycle.
NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX, powered by NVIDIA DOCA, delivers security enforcement directly in the data path. Security functions such as segmentation, telemetry, anomaly detection, and threat isolation are executed within the infrastructure fabric at line speed, reducing the burden on host systems and allowing AI workloads to run without interruption.
The integrated solution follows a four-step model:
1.Visibility: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation maps communications across AI training pipelines, inference services, data ingestion systems, and orchestration platforms.
2.Policy: Security policies are established using workload identity, application context, and runtime behavior, ensuring strict communication boundaries between systems.
3.Enforcement: NVIDIA DOCA applies policies directly within BlueField-4 silicon, enforcing segmentation and threat controls at infrastructure speed.
4.Containment: If a workload is compromised, the affected environment is isolated, limiting the threat’s impact while allowing the remainder of the AI factory to continue operating.
According to the companies, the architecture removes the traditional trade-off between AI performance and security by making Zero Trust enforcement a core infrastructure capability rather than an add-on product.
Akamai said the integrated Guardicore Segmentation and NVIDIA BlueField with NVIDIA DOCA solution is expected to become available in the second half of 2026. Integration with NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX on storage and infrastructure partner platforms is expected in the first half of 2027.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI factories are becoming critical assets that must be designed for containment, especially as frontier LLM-driven attacks increase the speed and scale of cyber threats. In environments where every clock cycle matters, traditional host-based security tools behave like a speed bump on a racetrack. By moving workload-aware segmentation onto NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX and DOCA, we are enforcing Zero Trust at the speed of AI workloads themselves, helping organizations contain threats before they spread across high-performance environments.”
Ofer Wolf, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Security, Akamai
“Data is the foundation of agentic AI factories, powering the intelligence behind autonomous decision-making and making robust protection more critical than ever for enterprises. The Akamai Guardicore enterprise security platform and NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX brings a Zero Trust layer directly into the infrastructure fabric, helping protect enterprise data by intelligently controlling how AI workloads communicate at scale.”
Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President, Networking, NVIDIA
