HPE Labs Links AI Sovereignty to Quantum Security

Wheeler said his customer engagements almost always include questions about AI and quantum, and that sovereignty has become the third recurring topic. “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,” he 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.”

Interest in data sovereignty is growing alongside enterprise AI adoption, according to Wheeler. Organizations increasingly need strict control, local processing and regional boundaries for sensitive data rather than exporting telemetry or training models across external cloud services.

Wheeler described sovereignty as a natural extension of data privacy regulations that have moved through governments worldwide in recent years. He said more than 170 countries have enacted some form of national data protection or privacy framework, and that AI is adding more fuel to that trend.

HPE’s quantum readiness work intersects with its data sovereignty solutions. The company is helping customers improve readiness through cryptographic posture management and infrastructure transformation while maintaining compliance, sovereignty, resilience and operational continuity, Wheeler said.

“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.”

HPE is preparing for a quantum-safe future by 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 area is quantum networking, specifically quantum key distribution. Wheeler explained that it uses quantum properties to securely distribute encryption keys between parties, which ultimately enables highly secure communications. As the industry extends zero trust networking, quantum key distribution could play a key role, he said.

Wheeler’s team is also examining confidential computing for AI. HPE already provides several solutions for data-at-rest encryption, including controller-based encryption, self-encrypting drives and specialized software integrations.

Wheeler said data must also be protected in transit between servers, from a cloud environment to an on-premises environment and in other combinations. The goal is to prevent a threat actor from getting in the middle and taking data. He added that HPE and other members of industry and academia are working on protecting data as it is operated on in a CPU, GPU or other accelerator.

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 described as a frontier AI model with advanced software-analysis and vulnerability-identification capabilities.