HPE and NVIDIA add secure agent tools to HPE Private Cloud AI

Governed access for developers and AI agents

The core of the announcement is an expansion of HPE Private Cloud AI, the turnkey AI factory solution in the portfolio. New HPE AI Essentials capabilities are meant to make it easier for developers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and AI agents to securely access and use enterprise AI services. According to HPE, production-grade APIs and MCP servers let organizations connect applications and autonomous agents to inference, model and knowledge services while keeping centralized governance, identity management and operational control.

HPE lists several new capabilities:

• Governed APIs: developers and ISVs can programmatically consume inference, models, knowledge services and AI pipelines.
• MCP services: MCP servers are versioned and governed by role, tenant and project, with auditing designed to let agents interact with enterprise systems under organizational governance.
• OpenAPI-based development: OpenAPI is the source of truth for supported interfaces and enables automatically generated documentation, software development kits and code samples.
• Identity and governance: role-based access control, machine identity support and audit logging are designed to manage both human and autonomous access.
• Regulated and sovereign support: API-first and Kubernetes-assisted onboarding now work across connected and air-gapped deployments.

HPE also announced that Private Cloud AI can now combine NVIDIA H200 GPUs and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs in the same cluster. NVIDIA's open-source KAI Scheduler adds quota- and priority-based scheduling to improve GPU utilization and workload placement across projects. Schneider Electric plans to pair HPE Private Cloud AI with its industrial and operational technology expertise to support Industrial AI Agents at the Edge.

New infrastructure for agents and AI factories

On the hardware side, HPE is introducing the NVIDIA Vera CPU Rack by HPE, a high-density, liquid-cooled system for CPU-intensive agentic AI and reinforcement learning workloads. HPE says it holds 256 NVIDIA Vera CPUs, supports 22.5K sandboxes and delivers 80% faster agentic CPU performance. The aim is to let AI factories scale agent sandboxes, RL evaluations and data-processing pipelines next to GPU compute.

HPE will also support the NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture for Safe AI Agents, an open, full-stack architecture for building, containing, observing and securing agents. It combines the NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime on NVIDIA Vera, NVIDIA Sentry with NVIDIA BlueField-4 for hardware-based security enforcement, and NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 for model inference. HPE and NVIDIA say they are working to extend protection from the agent runtime down to the underlying infrastructure.

For faster builds, HPE will support NVIDIA DSX POD, a reference design for pre-fabricated, validated infrastructure in modular containers. The goal is to reduce onsite integration work and shorten deployment timelines, building on the modular data center expertise HPE offers today with AI Mod Pod.

Confidential computing for sovereign workloads

For sovereign and regulated environments, HPE is expanding support for NVIDIA Confidential Computing on HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a Gen12 servers with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. According to HPE, this helps organizations protect frontier AI models and sensitive data on sovereign infrastructure while workloads are in use. On NVIDIA-Certified Servers, confidential computing creates hardware-based trusted execution environments designed to isolate AI workloads, including virtual machines, containers and bare metal deployments, from the underlying infrastructure.

Availability and what it means for customers

Timing varies by feature. Heterogeneous GPU support for NVIDIA H200 and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, and the KAI Scheduler capabilities, are generally available now. Updates to HPE Private Cloud AI with the HPE AI Essentials API platform, including administrator-enabled developer and ISV access, are rolling out in late 2026. A self-service HPE AI Essentials developer experience for application and agent registration, API and MCP discovery and credential management is planned for 2027.

HPE did not give pricing in the announcement. Cheri Williams, SVP and GM of Private Cloud and Flex Solutions at HPE, said customers need infrastructure that gives them "greater control over security, sovereignty, and how enterprise data is accessed and used." For enterprises, the package targets the step from experimentation to production, with agent access, identity, auditing and isolation handled inside their own hybrid or air-gapped environments.