NVIDIA announced partnerships to enhance security capabilities for industrial AI operations and critical infrastructure deployments.

Nvidia has extended its collaborations with a handful of security vendors in an effort to improve real-time threat detection and response across operational technology (OT) environments and industrial control systems (ICS). The company announced this news at the S4x26 OT and ICS security conference. According to Itay Ozery, director of product marketing for networking at Nvidia, "Many of these systems were originally designed for reliability and longevity, not for today's threat techniques."

Nvidia's collaborations with Akamai, Forescout, Palo Alto Networks, Siemens, and Xage Security are aimed at bringing accelerated computing and AI to OT cybersecurity. Ozery described these efforts as representing "a fundamental shift in OT and ICS cybersecurity, where security is embedded into and distributed across infrastructure, enforced at the edge and coordinated through centralized, AI-driven intelligence, bringing modern cybersecurity to the systems that keep the physical world running."

The joint efforts will use Nvidia's BlueField DPUs, which can directly handle security workloads, offloading those tasks from local host CPUs, and can enforce identity-based access, micro-segmentation and workload policies. The integration offloads user-configurable security processes from the host system to the Nvidia BlueField DPU and enables zero-trust segmentation without requiring software agents on fragile or legacy systems. Akamai states this hardware-isolated, "agentless" security approach helps organizations align with regulatory requirements and lower their risk profile for cyber insurance, as it "delivers deep, out-of-band visibility across systems, networks, and applications without disrupting operations. Security policies can be enforced in real time and are capable of creating a strong protective boundary around critical operational systems. The result is trusted insight into operational activity and improved overall cyber resilience."

Forescout applies network segmentation to contain lateral movement and enforce zero-trust controls, with customers able to offload intensive computing tasks such as deep packet inspections by running Forescout's on-premises sensor directly on the Nvidia BlueField, part of Nvidia Cybersecurity AI platform. Palo Alto Networks partnered with Nvidia to run its Prisma AI-powered Radio Security (AIRs) package on the Nvidia BlueField DPU, which is part of the Nvidia Enterprise AI Factory validated design. According to Palo Alto, "Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security delivers deep visibility into industrial traffic and continuous monitoring for abnormal behavior. By running these security services on Nvidia BlueField, inspection and enforcement happen directly at the infrastructure level, closer to the workloads."

At the S4x26 security conference, Siemens will demonstrate its AI-ready Industrial Automation DataCenter, a platform that collects, stores, processes, and serves operational and automation data across industrial environments, integrating Nvidia BlueField devices for integrated secure edge infrastructure. Xage will demonstrate how its distributed, identity-based security system, Xage Fabric Platform, operates with Nvidia BlueField devices to help customers protect energy assets, manage third-party access, and secure AI-driven operations. According to Xage, the platform "applies least-privilege controls at every step of these interactions, governing not only which agents can access specific data, pipelines, or models, but also the exact actions agents can perform—and for how long," with "role-based segmentation running at line speed on BlueField" to prevent unauthorized privilege escalation and data leakage.