Niobium unveils encrypted cloud platform for private AI

Security Brief Australia reports that Niobium has launched The Fog, an encrypted cloud platform for private AI and data processing now available in private beta. 

The service uses fully homomorphic encryption to let organizations run applications and AI workloads on data that remains encrypted throughout computation, with decryption keys held by the data owner rather than the cloud provider. CEO Kevin Yoder said organizations have had to accept data exposure as the cost of doing business in the cloud, and The Fog eliminates that tradeoff. The platform is built around Niobium's mistic Core FPGA accelerator, which the company claims delivers up to twice the FHE performance of any GPU or accelerator currently on the market. Initial applications include encrypted semantic search, federated learning, and machine learning classification for network intrusion detection.

Head of Cloud Rob Sherrard said encrypted compute is the next platform shift, and inside The Fog, computation happens entirely under encryption. Niobium is also developing an ASIC with SEMIFIVE and Samsung Foundry for higher performance while maintaining compatibility.