Nutanix & NVIDIA advance secure AI factories for government sector

Nutanix has detailed its ongoing collaboration with NVIDIA to offer secure and scalable artificial intelligence (AI) factory solutions for government agencies and enterprises.

The partnership features the integration of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) and the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) with NVIDIA's AI Factory for Government reference design.

The objective is to simplify deployment and security for AI in regulated and high-assurance environments, ensuring compliance with strict security standards such as FIPS-compliant encryption and sovereign control over data and infrastructure.

Addressing deployment challenges

Deploying AI at scale presents significant complexities for organisations, particularly within government and security-sensitive sectors.

These include fragmented infrastructure, rapidly evolving hardware and software stacks, diverse GPU and CPU requirements, and the need to meet a broad spectrum of performance and security policies. These complexities can slow down project timelines, increase costs, and raise operational risks, especially for workloads that entail sensitive or confidential data.

Nutanix aims to address these issues by providing a secure and efficient software foundation for AI factories, allowing organisations to easily deploy shared inference services through the Nutanix Enterprise AI solution. This flexibility enables customers to choose their preferred models and hardware platforms, adapting to the varying needs within their organisations.

The Nutanix Kubernetes Platform complements this offering, providing a production-grade Kubernetes base that eliminates the intricacies commonly associated with managing individual components of a Kubernetes stack. Both NAI and NKP solutions are designed to integrate with hardware solutions based on NVIDIA's enterprise reference architectures.

Government and compliance requirements

For government institutions and organisations with stringent security demands, complying with data privacy regulations and maintaining sovereign control over infrastructure adds to the operational burden.

A recent US Government Accountability Office report highlighted that 10 out of 12 federal agencies pointed to policy and compliance as principal obstacles to AI implementation.

To address these challenges, NVIDIA developed the AI Factory for Government reference design, a full-stack AI architecture tailored for high-assurance environments. Built on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, it incorporates NVIDIA-Certified Systems, NVIDIA Networking, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, alongside government-ready containers and open models such as NVIDIA Nemotron.

NVIDIA's government-ready containers have been tested to operate reliably on NKP and to interoperate with NAI, enabling streamlined deployment using NKP as the Kubernetes base and NAI for managing shared inference services. This integration is aimed at supporting the operationalisation of NVIDIA software components securely and efficiently.

Platform features and industry adoption

The solution offers consistent performance and simpler operations, employing hardened configurations, FIPS encryption, and ongoing vulnerability monitoring suitable for regulated sectors. NKP can be deployed on virtual machines or bare metal servers, depending on customer requirements. Nutanix recently announced that Ubuntu Pro would be available as an additional validated option for NKP Pro and Ultimate licenses, enhancing bare metal Kubernetes deployment for AI workloads.

The broader solution, which includes input from leading hardware manufacturers, is designed to help enterprises and government agencies adopt and expand AI workloads across both on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. The modular architecture supports scaling without enforcing lock-in for particular models or deployment modes, and can be adapted for various use cases, from law enforcement and healthcare to finance and security.

Industry perspectives

"Enterprises and government agencies are seeking secure, scalable AI architectures to streamline operations and solve challenges that demand both flexibility and compliance. Together, NVIDIA and Nutanix are enabling organisations to confidently deploy AI factories that accelerate innovation while meeting the highest security and regulatory standards."

said Justin Boitano, Vice President, Enterprise AI Products at NVIDIA.

"With Nutanix NKP and NAI, we're helping customers bring Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to life - delivering secure-by-default AI deployments that run on Cisco's GPU dense servers with NVIDIA AI infrastructure and software. By simplifying Kubernetes and AI lifecycle management, Cisco and Nutanix are helping organisations move from pilot to production faster, and accelerate ROI on their AI investments."

said Jeremy Foster, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Compute at Cisco.

"We're excited to work with NVIDIA and hardware leaders to deliver a fully integrated, hardened AI factory solution tailored for government needs. With built-in FIPS-compliant encryption across every layer, we're helping organisations protect sensitive data while accelerating AI adoption. By leveraging NKP and NAI, customers gain robust governance features-like fine-grained access controls, auditing, API token management, and full infrastructure visibility-enabling a fast time to first token, cost control, and the robust security for mission-critical AI workloads."

said Thomas Cornely, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Nutanix.