As director of HPE Labs, Andrew Wheeler (pictured) is uniquely positioned to observe rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and new developments for the emerging field of quantum computing.
Yet, there is a third area that Wheeler, an HPE fellow and senior vice president, is often asked about. It is one that draws on HPE’s decades of high-performance computing experience with sensitive data and national security environments to deliver privacy-compliant infrastructure.
“With most of my customer engagements, given my unique role in the company, I’m guaranteed to get asked two questions every time: something about AI and then something around quantum,” Wheeler said. “But now I would say the latest one coming in the conversation is around sovereignty. It’s some combination of those three guaranteed to come up in every external conversation that I have.”
Wheeler spoke with Dave Vellante, chief analyst for theCUBE Research, for the “Sovereign AI: From Strategy to Reality” video series, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how AI, sovereignty and quantum are becoming business imperatives as organizations rethink who controls their data, infrastructure, models and economics. (* Disclosure below.)
Need for control drives data sovereignty
Customer interest in data sovereignty is growing alongside the widespread adoption of enterprise AI. Organizations increasingly need to maintain strict control, local processing and regional boundaries over sensitive data rather than exporting telemetry or training models across external cloud services.
“I think of it a little bit as sovereignty being really a natural extension of evolution of a lot of the data privacy regulations that have been kind of rolling through various government bodies worldwide the last few years,” Wheeler told theCUBE. “Something like over 170 countries worldwide have enacted some national data protection or privacy framework. So, now AI is just really adding more fuel to that.”
HPE’s work in quantum readiness intersects with the company’s deployment of data sovereignty solutions. This involves helping customers improve their readiness through cryptographic posture management and infrastructure transformation while maintaining compliance, sovereignty, resilience and operational continuity.
“As a nation, you don’t want to be left in a situation where you have no answer … you want to make sure you’re properly defended against anything that quantum could do from a threat standpoint,” Wheeler said. “But, then also as a capability, you want to make sure that you’re equipped and your country essentially is poised to take advantage of the benefits that come with quantum. It’s a very natural evolution to the discussion and the news cycle, going from AI to quantum in terms of that sovereignty discussion.”
Future research to advance quantum
HPE’s work in preparing for a quantum-safe future involves incorporating post-quantum cryptography-readiness capabilities across key infrastructure domains, including compute and networking. Hewlett Packard Labs is researching a number of solutions that could help enterprises implement advanced security to protect critical data and systems.
“One of the things that we’re looking at with respect to quantum networking is something called quantum key distribution,” Wheeler explained. “Basically, this is looking at using quantum properties to securely distribute encryption keys between parties. Ultimately, that allows us to enable very highly secure communications. As we look to extend this concept of zero trust networking, quantum key distribution very well could play a key role there.”
Wheeler’s team is also looking closely at the area of confidential computing for AI. HPE already provides a number of solutions for data-at-rest encryption, including controller-based encryption, self-encrypting drives (or SEDs) and specialized software integrations.
Yet, there is another equally important area where data protection becomes particularly critical, according to Wheeler.
“I need to protect data while it’s in transit,” Wheeler said. “If I’m going from one server to the next, whether I’m going from a cloud environment to an on-prem environment, or all of the combinations of that, you want to make sure that some threat actor can’t get in the middle and get your data. How do we protect data as it’s actually being operated on, whether it’s in a CPU, a GPU or some other accelerator? There’s this area we’re working on [and] other members of the industry and the academic community are working on.”
Altering security assumptions
HPE was part of a select group of organizations that participated in Project Glasswing, an Anthropic PBC initiative that gave participating organizations access to Claude Mythos Preview. Mythos is a frontier AI model with advanced software-analysis and vulnerability-identification capabilities.
As noted by Wheeler in a blog post this week, AI, sovereignty requirements and emerging technologies such as quantum are altering the security assumptions organizations have relied on for decades. HPE’s experience with Mythos through Project Glasswing is informing the company’s efforts to strengthen its cybersecurity practices.
“Through our participation in Project Glasswing, and being part of that initial evaluation, we have a really deep understanding of the implications,” Wheeler told theCUBE. “We’ve taken a number of steps to basically shore up our own internal design lifecycle, how we do things. Everything is mission critical now, whether it’s the computing, the storage, the networking.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Sovereign AI: From Strategy to Reality” video series:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Sovereign AI: From Strategy to Reality” interview series. Neither HPE, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)