Fortinet has announced an integrated solution featuring FortiGate VM, Fortinet’s virtual cloud firewall, running directly on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). This integration embeds networking and brings isolated infrastructure acceleration into the artificial intelligence (AI) Factory, allowing core security functions to run on BlueField instead of the host. By moving protection into the data centre infrastructure, itself, the solution helps enterprises secure high-performance private cloud and AI environments without slowing critical workloads.

As AI and private-cloud architectures evolve, organisations are building high-density accelerated computing clusters and faster data centre fabrics to support latency-sensitive workloads. By bringing isolated infrastructure acceleration directly into the compute stack, organisations can keep pace with AI-scale traffic and maintain consistent protection across their environments.

Powered by the FortiOS operating system, FortiGate VM delivers industry-leading next-generation firewall capabilities that secures hybrid and multi-cloud, and now AI factories, with consistent security policies and centralised visibility and management, reducing complexity for security teams. Integrating FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField allows organisations to offload core security functions, including firewalling, segmentation, and zero-trust controls from the host CPU to the DPU.

This shift eliminates performance impact while improving multitenant isolation, throughput, and inspection accuracy for AI workloads. Deployed on BlueField, FortiGate VM enforces segmentation policies directly within the infrastructure fabric. As a result, organisations gain the following performance and security benefits:

  • Zero-impact high-performance: FortiGate VM running on BlueField executes on the DPU, bypassing the host CPU, reducing latency and enabling higher throughput for massive traffic loads.
  • Zero-trust segmentation and isolation: BlueField offloads networking and security functions in an isolated trust domain, purpose-built for isolating the security plane from compute workloads.
  • Simplified private-cloud integration: The validated guide covers configuration using standard Open vSwitch bridges (OVS switches for WAN and VXLAN LAN tunnels) and deployment of FortiGate VM images on BlueField-enabled servers.
  • Scalable multitenant architectures: The solution is ideal for cloud service providers, Telco edge, and enterprise private clouds needing hardware-accelerated inspection, secure isolation, and service chaining at scale.

Traditional host-based firewall architectures struggle to keep pace with the demands of AI workloads, edge services, agentic AI–era traffic, and multitenant isolation. With FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField, organisations get:

  • Security inspection with zero host-impact: Security is implemented at the hardware level, yet software defined.
  • Infrastructure-embedded zero-trust: BlueField anchors firewall and segmentation at the network-fabric level.
  • Operational efficiency and scale: Converged networking and security offloads reduce infrastructure complexity and total cost of ownership.

Commenting on the announcement, chief operating officer, Fortinet, said, “As enterprises are modernising their data centres to support AI, private cloud and edge applications require much higher throughput than traditional workloads. Integrating FortiGate VM on BlueField-3 DPU gives customers a practical way to keep security aligned with these new performance demands. By moving firewalling, segmentation, and zero-trust controls on the DPU, we help organisations improve isolation, reduce latency, and simplify consistent policy enforcement across their environments.”

Meanwhile, senior vice president of networking, NVIDIA, said, “AI factories demand an entirely new class of secure, accelerated infrastructure. By running FortiGate VM directly on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, we are extending the model of infrastructure-offloaded services to include advanced security. This collaboration allows organisations to enforce firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust policies at line rate, without impacting GPU workloads. Together with Fortinet, we are delivering the secure, high-performance fabric customers need to build and scale their AI-powered data centres with confidence.”