Check Point Launches Maestro MHO 200 With 400GbE Ports for AI Traffic

The problem: AI traffic strains data center security

Check Point says AI is pushing data center traffic to levels most security architectures were never built for, and much of that traffic is encrypted. Training, inference and agentic workloads are raising both perimeter and east-west traffic quickly. All of it needs inspection, while AI services must stay online around the clock.

The same data centers also run production environments and critical internal applications, which need the same level of protection. According to Check Point, this leaves many organizations with a hard choice: switch off advanced threat prevention to keep performance up, or overbuy appliances that sit idle until the next traffic spike.

Check Point positions the Maestro line as an answer. It describes a hyperscale firewall orchestrator as a system that combines multiple firewalls into one unit that organizations manage and scale together. The company says Maestro is the only hyperscale firewall orchestrator in the industry and that it works with no trade-off in advanced threat prevention.

What the MHO 200 changes

Check Point compares the MHO 200 with the MHO 175 and lists these improvements:

• Capacity: 12.8 Tbps of total fabric capacity, up from 3.2 Tbps, in the same compact 1RU form factor.
• Threat prevention: up to 4.5 Tbps of throughput per Maestro system, up from 1.1 Tbps.
• Storage: disk capacity for snapshots and logs rises from 120 GB to 512 GB, for faster restore and debugging.
• Remote management: Lights-Out Management (LOM) lets teams troubleshoot and recover remotely, reducing time spent on site.

Single-object management lets teams run the whole multi-firewall system as one, and live patching applies security updates with no reboots or downtime, the company says. Check Point also lists failover and recovery to backup sites, which keeps sessions live through failures, and support for placing workloads anywhere, including multi-site and hybrid cloud setups.

AI security at the firewall and who it targets

Check Point says organizations can use the MHO 200 to discover and secure every AI application, large language model (LLM), agent and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server directly from the firewall. The company adds that this is not limited to Maestro, and that the same can be done from every Check Point firewall.

The MHO 200 is aimed at large organizations where 400GbE is becoming the standard for high-end data centers and AI factories. Check Point names four groups:

• Enterprises building private AI, which can protect AI servers, models and production applications and add capacity without disruption.
• Neoclouds, described as GPU-as-a-service providers, which can inspect high-throughput training and inference traffic and scale protection as they grow.
• Government bodies building sovereign AI infrastructure, which can protect models and data inside their own infrastructure, among others through Check Point AI Factory Firewall running with NVIDIA BlueField data processing units (DPUs).
• Telcos and colocation operators, which can protect backbone and multi-tenant traffic at 400GbE speeds.

What it means for buyers

The MHO 200 is meant to tie together three other parts of Check Point's portfolio. The AI Network Firewall secures AI traffic, applications and agents. Agentic Network Security Orchestration automates policy tuning, health monitoring and compliance. AI Data Center Security, which includes a collaboration with NVIDIA, extends protection into AI infrastructure. Check Point says the new orchestrator gives all of these the scale AI demands.

The company also cites the NSS Labs 2025 Enterprise Firewall Comparative Report, which named Check Point a Recommended vendor. According to Check Point, the report showed a 99.91% exploit block rate and the highest overall security effectiveness of any vendor tested, at 99.59%.

For organizations running large AI data centers, the pitch is that they can keep advanced threat prevention switched on at 400GbE speeds and add capacity without buying idle hardware. The Maestro MHO 200 is available now in all regions, according to Check Point. The source does not give pricing.