Confidential AI for Secure Healthcare Innovation

Saying AI is transforming medicine would be an extreme understatement. 

From faster clinical trials and highly precise diagnostics to predictive analytics that can anticipate health risks, AI is changing how healthcare organizations work, innovate, and save lives. 

But for healthcare organizations, the greatest barrier to innovation isn’t technology; it’s trust. They can’t afford to expose sensitive patient data, research models, and proprietary algorithms to uncontrolled environments without risking compliance violations or patient privacy. 

At the same time, innovation can’t wait. Healthcare leaders are under pressure to help their organizations deliver AI-enabled insights that improve outcomes and efficiency. 

Now, that trade-off between speed and control is a thing of the past. 

Fortanix and NVIDIA have joined forces to deliver a turnkey, on-premises Confidential AI platform that gives healthcare organizations the power to build and deploy AI on sensitive data with verifiable trust, sovereignty and compliance built in. 

AI in Healthcare Needs Stronger Data and Model Security 

The promise of AI in healthcare is overwhelming, but so is the responsibility. Every medical image, record and dataset used to train AI models likely contains Protected Health Information (PHI), data which must remain private under HIPAA, HITRUST and GDPR, as well as a growing list of regional data protection rules. 

AI environments that rely on cloud infrastructure or fragmented security controls weren’t designed to handle the complexity of PHI in motion. This leads to trust gaps such as: 

• Data fragmentation: PHI is copied across systems and pipelines, multiplying the risk of exposure. 
• Complex environments: It’s often difficult to verify where and how sensitive workloads are running. 
• Model leakage: Trained models can inadvertently reveal sensitive details about individuals or research data. 
• Compliance overhead: Manual audits and disconnected logs make it hard to demonstrate adherence to healthcare regulations. 

As an unfortunate result of these issues, many healthcare AI initiatives remain stuck in pilot mode. What the industry needs is a provable chain of trust that allows sensitive data to stay protected from the moment it’s accessed until insights are delivered. 

Introducing the Fortanix + NVIDIA Confidential AI Platform 

Announced in October at NVIDIA GTC in Washington, D.C., the joint solution from Fortanix and NVIDIA combines Fortanix Armet AI with NVIDIA Confidential Computing GPUs to create a secure, sovereign platform for agentic AI, purpose-built for highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance and government. 

This turnkey, on-premises solution enables hospitals, research organizations, and biopharma companies to unlock AI’s full potential without compromising compliance or patient trust. Game-changing benefits include: 

End-to-End Trust for Healthcare Data 

The platform protects sensitive data and models throughout their entire lifecycle, combining NVIDIA Confidential Computing with Fortanix’s composite attestation technology across CPUs and GPUs. 

Only once the environment is verified and attested does the Fortanix Data Security Manager (DSM) release cryptographic keys, ensuring that PHI, models and secrets remain protected from unauthorized access. This “attestation-gated” approach creates an auditable, provable chain of trust for every AI operation. 

Built-In Compliance by Design 

Backed by FIPS 140-2 Level 3-certified HSM technology, the Fortanix platform enforces strict key custody, role-based access controls and consistent audit logging. This helps healthcare organizations streamline compliance reporting, simplify audits and reduce operational risk, all while meeting HIPAA and HITRUST requirements. 

Faster Time to Production 

With Fortanix Armet AI, healthcare innovators can transition from pilot to production much more quickly. The platform provides a confidential AI pipeline with built-in guardrails, observability and orchestration, allowing teams to securely train and deploy AI models on their own data. 

By running on NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPU architectures, the solution delivers the computational power healthcare organizations need to develop life-saving models, with confidentiality verified at every layer. 

From Research to Real-World Care: Securing the Healthcare AI Pipeline 

Healthcare organizations generate some of the world’s most valuable—and sensitive—data. When this data is used to develop new drugs, run clinical studies or analyze population-level health trends, it must adhere to strict privacy and governance boundaries. 

The Fortanix + NVIDIA platform enables healthcare organizations to securely operationalize AI across the full lifecycle: 

• Research: Universities and their colleagues in the pharma industry can collaborate on federated learning models without moving (and identifying) raw data across institutions. Each party trains locally within a verified enclave, meaning they only share encrypted insights. 
• Clinical Diagnostics: Hospitals can analyze imaging or EHR records with AI models that run entirely inside confidential computing enclaves. This means PHI never leaves the trusted environment, and all operations are logged for audit and compliance purposes. 
• Public Health and Genomics: Researchers can combine sensitive datasets from multiple jurisdictions without violating sovereignty or privacy laws. Verified compute and key attestations ensure that datasets stay protected, even when processed across hybrid or multi-cloud settings. 

The Fortanix + NVIDIA platform ensures that healthcare AI runs only on verified infrastructure, protecting both patients and research integrity. 

Why Does Confidential AI Matter for Healthcare? 

By combining Fortanix’s deep expertise in confidential computing and data security with NVIDIA’s leading-edge GPU architectures, this solution delivers: 

• End-to-end protection: Data and models stay secure throughout their lifecycle, verified by NVIDIA NRAS and enforced by Fortanix DSM. 
• Compliance built in: Immutable logs, key custody and FIPS-certified controls simplify audit readiness. 
• Operational agility: Teams can deploy and scale AI models in days, not months, while maintaining full data sovereignty. 

For healthcare leaders, this means faster innovation without compromise, enabling clinicians, researchers and data scientists to safely use AI on the data that matters most. 

The Future of Trusted AI in Healthcare is Here 

Healthcare’s digital transformation has reached a defining moment. As AI takes on a larger role in diagnosis, discovery and care delivery, trust is quickly becoming the new measure of progress. The organizations that can innovate securely will be the ones that lead this next era of medicine. 

In that vein, confidential computing has emerged as the foundation for that trust—the new standard for protecting medical data, research models and patient privacy. Together, Fortanix and NVIDIA are shaping what this secure future looks like. 

Their joint Confidential AI platform is more than a technology milestone; it’s a blueprint for secure digital medicine. It enables hospitals, research institutions, and life sciences teams to accelerate innovation while maintaining patient data privacy, compliance and, perhaps most importantly, full control. 

With Fortanix Armet AI and NVIDIA Confidential Computing, healthcare organizations can: 

• Keep PHI and research data confidential with verified, attested environments 
• Move from pilot projects to real-world AI deployments with cryptographic assurance 
• Meet regulatory requirements automatically through immutable audit trails 
• Enable secure collaboration between hospitals, research centers, and biopharma partners 

Healthcare can now innovate without compromise. Request a demo or connect with our experts to explore how your organization can build trust into every stage of AI — from research to real-world care.