NEAR AI builds infrastructure for private AI model execution using confidential computing

Here’s a question that should keep every enterprise CTO up at night: when you send sensitive data to an AI model for inference, who else can see it? NEAR AI is building infrastructure designed to make the answer definitively “no one.” The project, tied to the NEAR Protocol ecosystem, is constructing a confidential AI platform that runs both open-weight and closed AI models inside Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs. Your prompts and the model’s outputs stay encrypted and isolated in hardware-protected enclaves, invisible even to the people running the servers. How the tech actually works NEAR AI Cloud offers an API for private inference that integrates two heavyweight confidential computing technologies: Intel TDX and NVIDIA Confidential Computing. These are hardware-level isolation mechanisms that create encrypted memory spaces where code and data are shielded from the host operating system, the cloud provider, and NEAR AI itself. Cryptographic attestation lets users verify that the correct model ran in a genuine secure environment, without any tampering. The platform supports both open-weight models and “proxied closed models” through its IronClaw agent framework. Open-weight...