Phala vs. Google Cloud Confidential VMs

Phala is transforming AI deployment by offering a confidential compute architecture that protects sensitive workloads with hardware-level guarantees. Built on advanced TEE technology, Phala ensures that code, data, and model outputs remain private—even from administrators, cloud providers, and hypervisors. Its catalog of confidential AI models spans leaders like OpenAI, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, and Qwen, all deployable in encrypted GPU environments within minutes. Phala’s GPU TEE system supports NVIDIA H100, H200, and B200 chips, delivering approximately 95% of native performance while maintaining 100% data privacy. Through Phala Cloud, developers can write code, package it using Docker, and launch trustless applications backed by automatic encryption and cryptographic attestation. This enables private inference, confidential training, secure fine-tuning, and compliant data processing without handling hardware complexities. Phala’s infrastructure is built for enterprise needs, offering SOC 2 Type II certification, HIPAA-ready environments, GDPR-compliant processing, and a record of zero security breaches. Real-world customer outcomes include cost-reduced financial compliance workflows, privacy-preserving medical research, fully verifiable autonomous agents, and secure AI SaaS deployments. With thousands of active teams and millions in annual recurring usage, Phala has become a critical privacy layer for companies deploying sensitive AI workloads. It provides the secure, transparent, and scalable environment required for building AI systems people can confidently trust.

Google Cloud's Confidential Computing provides hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) that ensure data is encrypted during active use, thus finalizing the encryption for data both at rest and while in transit. This comprehensive suite features Confidential VMs, which incorporate technologies such as AMD SEV, SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, and NVIDIA confidential GPUs, as well as Confidential Space to enable secure multi-party data sharing, Google Cloud Attestation, and split-trust encryption mechanisms. Confidential VMs are specifically engineered to support various workloads within Compute Engine and are compatible with numerous services, including Dataproc, Dataflow, GKE, and Vertex AI Workbench. The foundational architecture guarantees encryption of memory during runtime, effectively isolating workloads from the host operating system and hypervisor, and also includes attestation capabilities that offer clients verifiable proof of secure enclave operations. Use cases for this technology are wide-ranging, encompassing confidential analytics, federated learning in industries such as healthcare and finance, deployment of generative AI models, and collaborative data sharing within supply chains. By adopting this cutting-edge method, the trust boundary is significantly reduced to only the guest application, rather than the broader computing environment, which greatly enhances the security and privacy of sensitive workloads. Furthermore, this innovative solution empowers organizations to maintain control over their data while leveraging cloud resources efficiently.