Fortinet integrates FortiGate VM with NVIDIA BlueField to support AI infrastructure security

Fortinet has announced an integrated solution that runs FortiGate VM, its virtual cloud firewall, directly on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). According to the company, the integration is designed to bring infrastructure-level security acceleration into AI-focused data centre environments by offloading core security functions from host CPUs to the DPU.

The solution embeds networking and security controls into the data centre fabric, which Fortinet said is intended to help enterprises secure high-performance private cloud and AI environments without impacting application or GPU workloads.

“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,” said John Whittle, Chief Operating Officer, Fortinet.

NVIDIA positioned the collaboration as part of a broader shift toward infrastructure-offloaded services in AI data centres.

“AI factories demand an entirely new class of secure, accelerated infrastructure. By running FortiGate VM directly on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, we’re 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’re delivering the secure, high-performance fabric customers need to build and scale their AI-powered data centres with confidence,” said Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA.

Infrastructure acceleration for AI and private cloud environments

According to Fortinet, as AI and private-cloud architectures evolve, enterprises are increasingly deploying high-density accelerated computing clusters and faster data centre fabrics to support latency-sensitive workloads. Embedding security directly into infrastructure is positioned as a way to maintain protection while scaling performance.

Powered by FortiOS, FortiGate VM provides next-generation firewall capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With the integration on NVIDIA BlueField, Fortinet said core security functions—including firewalling, segmentation and zero-trust enforcement—are offloaded from the host CPU to the DPU.

The company stated that this architectural shift is intended to improve multitenant isolation, throughput and inspection accuracy for AI-driven workloads, while maintaining centralised visibility and management.

Key capabilities highlighted by Fortinet

• Zero-impact high performance
  FortiGate VM runs directly on the BlueField DPU, bypassing the host CPU to reduce latency and support higher throughput for large traffic volumes.
• Zero-trust segmentation and isolation
  Security and networking functions are offloaded into an isolated trust domain on the DPU, separating the security plane from compute workloads.
• Simplified private cloud integration
  The validated deployment approach supports standard Open vSwitch (OVS) configurations for WAN and VXLAN LAN tunnels, along with FortiGate VM images on BlueField-enabled servers.
• Scalable multitenant architectures
  The solution is positioned for cloud service providers, telco edge deployments and enterprise private clouds that require hardware-accelerated inspection, isolation and service chaining at scale.

Security for high-speed AI infrastructure

Fortinet noted that traditional host-based firewall architectures can struggle to keep pace with AI workloads, multitenant environments and emerging agentic AI traffic patterns. By embedding security at the infrastructure level, the solution aims to address these limitations.

According to the company, FortiGate VM on NVIDIA BlueField enables:

• Security inspection with zero host impact, implemented at the hardware level while remaining software-defined
• Infrastructure-embedded zero-trust, anchoring segmentation and firewall controls within the network fabric
• Operational efficiency and scalability, by converging networking and security offloads to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership