F5, Nvidia team to boost AI, cloud security

F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes deployed on Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs offers a secure and compliant AI networking infrastructure, letting customers adopt advanced AI capabilities without compromising data privacy, wrote Ash Bhalgat, senior director of cloud, telco, and cybersecurity market development for networking at Nvidia,in a blog.

“By offloading tasks like load balancing, routing and security to the BlueField-3 DPU, F5 BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes efficiently routes AI prompts to LLM instances and reduces energy use. This ensures scalable AI performance while optimizing GPU resource utilization,” Bhalgat stated.

In addition, the collaboration aims to help governments and industries manage sensitive data while accelerating AI application delivery. The sovereign cloud market is projected to reach $250 billion by 2027, according to IDC. Meanwhile, ABI Research projects the market for AI foundation models will be $30 billion by 2027.

Sovereign clouds are built to meet strict data privacy and localization requirements. They’re critical for industries handling sensitive data, such as telecommunications and financial services, as well as government agencies, Bhalgat stated.

This isn’t the first time F5 and Nvidia have collaborated. For example, in 2021 they worked to integrate F5’s technology with the Nvidia Morpheus AI framework to offer pretrained AI models and help detect and mitigate security threats.