Fortinet’s sees advantage in AI, chip, data center investments

Fortinet is betting that long-term investments in its own AI data centers and silicon, being early to quantum-safe offerings and AI agents moving to the edge will drive its results in the future.

The company outlined its cybersecurity vision at its Accelerate 2026 conference and built on an industry analyst day last year. Constellation Research analyst Chirag Mehta covered Fortinet's analyst day in 2025 and noted:

"The conversations with Fortinet’s executive leadership team felt refreshingly grounded. No forced big-bang announcements. Instead, the focus was on how 25 years of engineering work shaped the company’s platform and why those choices matter more now as security shifts toward hybrid deployments and AI workloads.

Many vendors today talk about platforms. Most mean a sales bundle rather than a true platform. Fortinet means shared OS, shared agent, shared silicon, and shared telemetry."

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And as AI agents are becoming operational and increasingly at the edge, the ball may be moving toward Fortinet. In other words, Fortinet's infrastructure, built over 25 years, could become a differentiator with better operating costs.

Referring to Fortinet's latest version of FortiOS, CEO Ken Xie said AI traffic is moving toward the edge and that plays into the company's vision. "FortiOS has more than 30 functions integrated and about half of that is using our ASIC to accelerate. That's the differentiation we have compared to other competitors," he said. "They have acquired different companies, with separate SD-WAN OS, separate network security OS, separate SASE OS. So, we have a single OS with ASIC, a huge advantage to accelerate half the function there, which gives each function like a 5 to 10x better performance, lower cost and integrated together."

Xie said Fortinet has spent $1 billion developing its chips but has hit scale. Fortinet also operates its own data centers, which means it can serve sovereign AI security demand on its own terms. "We have our GPU farm. We have our own AI model. We have own SASE data center. We have the Forti stack to make it more secure," said Xie.

Fortinet will also leverage its new chip that's coming up. Because Fortinet builds its own infrastructure, Xie reckons that it is in the best position to secure it.

Fortinet's latest news

Fortinet last week announced FortiOS 8.0, the latest release of its operating systems for the Fortinet Security Fabric. FortiOS 8.0, outlined at Fortinet Accelerate 2026, included a bevy of AI-driven security features, next-gen SASE and quantum-safe protection. Fortinet has been offering quantum-safe technologies and has been ahead of the curve relative to other vendors.

Additions to FortiOS 8.0 include:

• FortiView for AI attack surface and shadow AI via real-time visibility into how AI apps and services are used in an enterprise.
• AI-aware application control that allows approved GenAI tools and blocks risky actions.
• MCP and agent-to-agent visibility to track app, agents and tool interactions.
• AI agents across the Fortinet Security Fabric to streamline tasks.
• SASE Outpost to extend enforcement to on-premises data centers and private clouds and sovereign SASE deployment options.
• Quantum-resilient cryptographic controls and quantum-safe SASE capabilities.

The company also outlined a series of agentic AI tools for security operations and analytics. Fortinet previewed FortiSOC, a cloud-delivered offering that brings together the core capabilities of FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM, FortiSOAR, and FortiTIP into an integrated service. FortiAI has new agentic workflows throughout.

Fortinet also added AI capabilities to FortiEndpoint and FortiGuard SOC-as-a-service.

Fortinet's bets

Aside from the bet on its own infrastructure and stack, Fortinet sees the following tailwinds for its business

Networking and security are converging. The demand for secure networking is surging amid AI threats.

Consolidation of vendors. Fortinet executives said there's platformization and then there's an integrated platform from the hardware up.

Enterprises are moving to multi-cloud and hybrid approaches as AI will require on-prem deployments for security as well as sovereignty and edge computing.

"With the move towards agentic AI and with MCP and agent-to-agent communication, that data traffic actually or the traffic shifts to the edge between the remote endpoints and inside the enterprise environment," said Robert May, Executive Vice President of Technology & Product Management. "The need for on-prem goes up."

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Operations technology will be a big market and that will drive sovereign AI security. Xie said the edge is becoming critical to AI deployments. Previously air-gapped industrial assets are now being connected and that requires more OT security controls.

Quantum security. Xie and other executives returned to quantum security repeatedly. Fortinet was early and is now seeing more demand. "Because of the strength in financial services and public sector, quantum has been a topic for us for a longer time. We've had it and certain customers have deployed it," said Christiane Ohlgart, Chief Accounting Officer, CFO and Principal Financial & Accounting Officer. "There's more awareness because the ability to decrypt certain things is coming nearer so more customers in other industries are more aware."

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