Strength in numbers.
It’s been a wild ride for Nvidia, the company that has seen an explosion in growth with the rise of AI in the tech industry. The firm is promoting its accelerated computing stack as the way of the future in an effort to diversify how it’s seen in the public sphere to include more aspects of the AI revolution.
Nvidia has become known in recent years for its chips—but the company has developed a long list of offerings in its over 30 years of existence. With the expansion of its market share, Nvidia now aims to ensure it’s able to appeal to its new customer base. For company CSO David Reber, that requires staying on top of whatever security concerns might come up.
“Our role is to be the platform that all cyber companies can [use to] accelerate their workloads,” Reber told IT Brew, adding, “We want to make sure that the core platform has the security features there ready to be utilized, so you can run secure AI workloads from a platform.”
Moving on up. Reber sees the pace of change at Nvidia as notable—a “massive” shift in a company where things are “ever-changing”—but also part of an overall effort in the industry to take charge of security. Unsurprisingly, Nvidia is interested in how AI applies to solving the problem.
“We have our internal AI red team; we have AI research teams that are constantly looking at what are the new, novel threats,” Reber said. “We’re working with our industry peers and partners.”
One of those industry partners in what Reber calls Nvidia’s “collective defense perspective” is the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Cristian Rodriguez, CrowdStrike field CTO, talked to IT Brew at the RSAC conference about the partnership, one that his company said in March 2024 was aimed at delivering Nvidia’s generative AI capabilities to consumers via CrowdStrike’s platform.
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But despite the role of AI in security, things aren’t changing too much on the ground.
“The larger question is: Is AI creating a threat that we can’t get our arms around and creating a new attack vector?” Rodriguez said. “The partnership that we have with companies like Nvidia, anyone that’s investing heavily in AI, really, is tied to your traditional security strategy.”
Expand the surface. Nvidia works with a number of cybersecurity vendors, Reber said, and there are several general interaction types involved—AI acceleration of their products, threat mitigation, and information sharing and collaboration. The company’s capabilities make it well suited for that type of expansion.
“We work with them in order to figure out, okay, what is their unique value they’re providing the market, and how can we AI accelerate that, whether that’s from new detection techniques to agentic workflows for the SOC, to agentic workflows for automated pen testing, to just incident response capabilities, auto summarization,” Reber said.“You name it, we help them.”
In practice, that means an overview of a company’s threat surface and vulnerabilities, Rodriguez explained, from misconfigurations in cloud service providers to identity access management to data classifications, and more. That’s similar to other partnerships CrowdStrike has, which all focus on insight.
“A lot of it is tied to implementing a platform to secure the services around AI and actually then understanding things like the containers that are being split up into,” Rodriguez said.