Canadian AI Firm Cohere Launches Public Beta of Confidential Computing on Model Vault Using NVIDIA H100s and Microsoft Azure

Canadian artificial intelligence company Cohere announced on October 22, 2026, that its enterprise model inference service, Model Vault, now supports Confidential Computing and has entered public beta. The feature leverages Microsoft Azure infrastructure and NVIDIA H100 GPU confidential computing capabilities to provide hardware-level protection for sensitive workloads in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and law.

While traditional encryption protects data at rest and in transit, confidential computing targets data in use. In Model Vault's new architecture, inference runs within a hardware-isolated environment spanning both CPU and GPU. NVIDIA's confidential computing technology ensures that GPU memory is protected and traffic between the CPU and GPU is encrypted while the model performs inference. This means that even cloud providers or Cohere's infrastructure operators cannot access plaintext data.

Beyond hardware isolation, Cohere has introduced a remote attestation mechanism. Customers can cryptographically verify the processing environment before sending sensitive data, checking whether the hardware, firmware, and software configuration meet approved security policies. If the environment fails verification, the client refuses to send the request. This shifts the trust model from "trusting vendor promises" to "verifying technical controls yourself."

Additionally, Model Vault implements end-to-end encryption for application payloads. Request contents remain encrypted until they enter the confidential environment, where they are decrypted only within that trusted boundary, with responses similarly protected on the return path. Phil Blunsom, CTO at Cohere, stated that this allows enterprises to avoid choosing between the simplicity of managed AI and control over their most sensitive information.