NEAR AI Cloud brings private inference to GitHub Copilot through a VSCode extension

Developers who love GitHub Copilot but wince at sending their code to someone else’s servers now have another option. A new VSCode extension lets Copilot run models hosted on NEAR AI Cloud, a service built around private inference. How the Copilot connection works The integration runs through the “More Providers” VS Code extension, which plugs into GitHub Copilot Chat. That extension supports 258 OpenAI-compatible options, and NEAR AI Cloud is one of them. NEAR AI Cloud slots in neatly because it exposes an OpenAI-compatible API. Tools built to talk to OpenAI-style endpoints can point at NEAR AI Cloud without rewiring existing workflows. A June 2026 update to VS Code’s Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support made this easier still. That change removed the GitHub sign-in requirement for custom and OpenAI-compatible endpoints. What makes the inference private The privacy claim rests on Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs. NEAR AI Cloud builds these on Intel TDX and NVIDIA confidential computing technologies. On NEAR AI Cloud, that protection covers three things: the prompts users submit, the model weights, and the outputs the model generates. All of them are isolated from infrastructur...