No need to repeat how AI is transforming industries. Let’s talk about what really mattered for developers: how painful it used to be to build actual Confidential AI applications.
For years, securing AI workloads meant wrestling with Intel SGX, which sounded great in theory but came with a catch: Compatibility struggles with SGX.
For developers wanting confidentiality, they had to modify their entire application and pray that the missing syscalls wouldn’t break everything. Half the time, they were debugging compatibility issues instead of actually building AI solutions. It was a time sink, a headache, and a roadblock to real-world adoption.
Then came Intel TDX and suddenly, building confidential dApps didn’t have to be this hard.
With TDX, builders run AI workloads in secure VMs without rewriting a single line of code. No more battling syscall limitations, no more forced compatibility fixes, just a seamless, high-performance confidential environment that works out of the box.
This shift is already making waves, and iExec is at the forefront of it. As a Gold Member of the Intel Partner Alliance, iExec has been leading the way in Confidential Computing. Its AI model monetization solution was featured in Intel’s AI catalog, reinforcing its role in shaping the future of privacy-first AI.
And it doesn’t stop there. Through NVIDIA’s Inception Program, iExec gained early access to advanced GPU technology, unlocking even greater scalability and security for AI workloads.
Meaning iExec and Intel® TDX make Confidential AI effortless.
Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX) is a hardware-isolated trusted execution environment (TEE) designed to enhance data confidentiality and integrity in virtualized environments.
Built into Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon® Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids), Intel TDX introduces Trust Domains (TDs) to isolate virtual machines (VMs) from the hypervisor, BIOS, System Management Mode (SMM), and even cloud service providers (CSPs). This isolation ensures that AI workloads run in a secure execution environment, free from unauthorized access, even by cloud providers.
For AI applications, security and privacy are crucial, particularly when handling sensitive datasets, proprietary models, or confidential computations. Intel TDX provides hardware-based protections that significantly reduce the attack surface while maintaining high performance.
Intel TDX employs several mechanisms to safeguard AI workloads:
Intel TDX combines these features to create a trusted execution environment (TEE). This helps organizations deploy AI models safely in the cloud. It ensures data confidentiality, integrity, and compliance.
Both Intel TDX and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are designed for Confidential Computing technology, but they serve different use cases. iExec supports both technologies, giving developers the flexibility to choose the best fit for their AI applications.
Intel SGX enables the creation of secure enclaves, isolated memory regions that protect sensitive computations from external access. This is ideal for:
Unlike SGX, which protects applications at a granular level, Intel TDX isolates entire virtual machines. This makes it a better choice for large-scale AI workloads, where bigger memory and multi-key encryption are required.
TDX’s Secure Arbitration Mode (SEAM) further strengthens workload isolation, making it ideal for privacy-focused AI applications that need to process large datasets securely.
The combination of Intel TDX and iExec creates new possibilities for Confidential AI, enabling secure, decentralized, and scalable execution of AI workloads.
iExec provides the essential infrastructure for developers to build AI applications that prioritize:
Leading the way in secure AI computing, iExec empowers developers to build the next generation of privacy-preserving AI applications.