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On February 23, 2026, Nvidia launched a big-time partnership with cybersecurity providers Akamai and Palo Alto Networks (along with Forescout, Xage Security, and industrial giant Siemens) to take AI-powered, accelerated computing to the operations technology (OT) and industrial controls (ICS) cybersecurity.

With more and more cyber threats targeting industrial systems of interest in the energy, manufacturing, transportation, and utilities industries, conventional defense mechanisms are being demoted by performance limitations in high-availability deployments. The Nvidia project is based on the concept of offloading and accelerating security operations with its BlueField Data Processing Units (DPUs) to save and preserve real-time threat identification, better visibility, and zero-trust enforcement that do not interrupt the operation.

Akamai uses the Guardicore Platform to operate on BlueField to provide agentless micro-segmentation to isolate workloads, devices, and applications into secure zones and apply a zero-trust policy at the edge, which is perfect with OT/ICS networks.

Having developed Neo purposefully in deep packet inspection, anomaly monitoring, and AI-based runtime protection customized to industry edges, Palo Alto Networks plans to integrate its Prisma AI Runtime Security (AIRS) on BlueField DPUs as part of Nvidia Enterprise AI Factory validated designs.

These integrations are meant to ensure that critical infrastructure is safeguarded against advanced attacks where hacking will lead to real damage or damage to the economy. Integrating AI directly into hardware, the partners make it possible to react quicker, experience less latency, and be highly resilient in relation to the old methods.

The ecosystem strategy makes Nvidia a key enabler of OT cybersecurity, accompanied by domain know-how through partners. The move is a sign of increasing AI-enhanced defenses in the face of increasing OT threats and represents a move by Nvidia to extend its AI training capabilities to enterprise and industrial security. With deployments in place, industries would experience objective uptime and risk mitigation and general cyber resilience of critical systems globally.