Telus and Santa Clara, Calif.-based Fortanix announced Monday a new Confidential AI solution — built on NVIDIA infrastructure — that enables Canadian organizations in regulated industries to train and deploy AI on their most sensitive data with cryptographic proof that it remains securely within Canadian jurisdiction.
“Confidential AI applies advanced encryption technology — called Confidential Computing — specifically to protect AI workloads, maintaining encryption of sensitive data even while being actively processed by the AI system,” explained a Monday press release from Telus.
Developed jointly by Telus and Fortanix, leveraging NVIDIA infrastructure at Telus’s Sovereign AI Factory in Rimouski, Quebec, the new solution uses cryptographic attestation and secure key releases to establish a verifiable chain of trust, Telus said, adding this ensures proprietary models, sensitive data and agent credentials remain encrypted throughout training, fine-tuning and inference.
“TELUS has built Canada’s first fully Sovereign AI infrastructure so that researchers, startups, enterprises and public institutions no longer have to choose between protecting their data and unlocking the transformative benefits of AI,” Hesham Fahmy, chief information officer of Telus, said in the telecom’s press release. “This latest innovation with Fortanix and NVIDIA adds a critical, final security layer to protect data while it is actively being processed. Now, regulated organizations can deploy AI even on their most sensitive workloads, with auditable proof of protection, so they can accelerate innovation confidently without compromising their control, privacy and compliance.”
“Trust is not implicit — it must be proven,” Anuj Jaiswal, chief product and strategy officer at Fortanix, said in a statement. “With verified attestation and attestation-gated secure key release, we ensure that models, data and agents are only accessible inside approved confidential environments. By combining this with TELUS’ sovereign infrastructure, organizations can deploy AI on their most sensitive data with cryptographic proof of protection, all on Canadian soil.”
Before any sensitive data is decrypted, the Confidential AI solution performs a cryptographic verification of the trusted execution environment using NVIDIA Confidential Computing attestation services to confirm the hardware is genuine and secure, Telus’s press release said. Encryption keys are released only when this verification succeeds; if the security check fails, the data remains locked.
“This approach provides the gates behind which sensitive data remains protected and inaccessible throughout the entire AI development and deployment process,” the release explained.
The jointly developed Confidential AI solution will be available through the Telus Sovereign AI Factory on NVIDIA AI infrastructure, with Fortanix providing verified attestation and attestation-gated secure key release.
