NEAR AI Joins NVIDIA Inception Program to Advance Privacy-Preserving AI

• NEAR AI has joined Nvidia’s Inception program to build out its privacy-preserving and verifiable AI solution.
• The network will combine cryptographic verification with Nvidia’s Confidential Computing to independently verify AI systems without exposing data.

NEAR AI has joined the Nvidia Inception program to advance its mission of building verifiable, enterprise-level AI. Announcing the move, it stated that joining the program will grant it access to Nvidia’s technical expertise, hardware resources and advanced tools, accelerating its development. Nvidia remains by far the world’s largest AI hardware maker and is powering the development of the most powerful large-language models, from OpenAI’s and Meta’s to Deepseek’s and Anthropic’s.

NEAR AI has joined the @nvidia Inception Program to accelerate verifiable, privacy-preserving AI.

The program provides advanced access to NVIDIA’s GPU resources, developer tooling, and technical expertise to help NEAR AI power secure, enterprise-grade AI systems at scale. pic.twitter.com/pKOepKpThP

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) January 13, 2026

Near AI launched to provide a critical tool that AI requires as it ventures into sensitive and strictly regulated sectors like health and finance: verifiability. While the technology solely focused on performance and throughput in its early days, enterprises now require security and privacy guarantees, including execution integrity and auditability. NEAR AI Targets Verifiable User-Owned AI One of the main components of the new partnership is Nvidia’s Confidential Computing. This technology enables data to stay encrypted while it’s being processed, not just in transit or at rest. The project stated:

By combining confidential computing with cryptographic verification, NEAR AI provides the infrastructure for AI systems to be independently verified without exposing proprietary data or user inputs. This approach enables collaboration, compliance, and trust without sacrificing privacy.

The project says it’s laying the groundwork for a future where AI systems will be verifiable and transparent by design, and will be aligned with the privacy and security interests of their users. Partnering with Nvidia will reinforce this vision and open up access to a wide network of enterprise users who rely on Nvidia hardware and software services. Overall, the NEAR Protocol has become one of the industry leaders in artificial intelligence. As we reported last month, it ranked third for the most AI development in the blockchain world after ICP and Chainlink. An earlier report revealed that its AI focus was propelling its growth, with its market cap shooting up 24% in Q3. NEAR AI has been at the heart of the development. The NEAR AI Cloud and Private Chat, launched last month, have now been integrated into ecosystems like Brave and OpenMind AGI, expanding the protocol’s reach to over 100 million new users. NEAR trades at $1.85, gaining 5.5% in the past 24 hours for a $2.39 billion market cap.