Confidential Computing Across Cloud Providers

State: early 2026. This space moves quarterly; verify before committing.

Capability matrix

Provider-specific notes

Microsoft Azure

• The broadest SKU catalog. Currently the only public cloud with SGX, TDX, SEV-SNP, and H100 CC at the same time.
• Azure Attestation (MAA) is mature, multi-platform, and returns a JWT a relying party can verify.
• Secure Key Release (SKR) in Key Vault with Managed HSM is the strongest KMS-gating story among the majors.
• Confidential AKS integrates CoCo and Kata.
• Caveat: MAA is an Azure-operated verifier. For strongest assurance, verify raw quotes against Intel/AMD directly, not via MAA alone.

AWS

• Nitro Enclaves are AWS's in-house solution: isolated mini-VMs carved out of a parent EC2 instance, with signed attestation documents. Not encrypted DRAM. Isolation is hypervisor- and silicon-level via Nitro, not memory encryption. For many threat models this is enough because the Nitro hypervisor is smaller and more trusted than a general-purpose hypervisor, but it is a different model than SGX/TDX/SEV-SNP.
• AWS documents SEV-SNP support for selected M6a, C6a and R6a configurations, with separate requirements for Shared, Dedicated Instance and Dedicated Host tenancy.
• KMS plus Nitro attestation conditions is the cleanest KMS-gated-key pattern in the industry. A single IAM policy clause can enforce "only release key to enclave with PCR0=X."
• No GA H100 CC yet. Watch Trainium and Inferentia; AWS is building in-house confidential accelerators.

Google Cloud

• Pioneered public-cloud SEV-based Confidential VMs in 2020.
• Confidential Space is a serverless-style product that packages a hardened Confidential VM, attestation, and workload identity federation to GCP APIs. A good default for multi-party computation and attested workloads.
• GKE Confidential Nodes provides SNP nodes at scale; TDX is in preview.
• A3 Confidential is the main offering for confidential LLM inference with H100 CC.

Oracle OCI

• Fewer SKUs but aggressive on H100 CC bare metal. Notable because you own the whole node, removing co-tenant side channels.
• OCI Vault and attestation are less mature than Azure or AWS; you will do more plumbing.

IBM Cloud

• Hyper Protect Virtual Servers use IBM Z Secure Execution (s390x), a different TEE history from x86 with strong pedigree for regulated finance and health.
• Not relevant to NVIDIA GPU confidential inference today.

Alibaba / Tencent / Huawei

• Alibaba ECS has SGX, TDX, and SNP offerings. Attestation collateral flows through Alibaba's own services. Relevant for APAC deployments; audit the trust chain carefully because the operator's verifier is also the cloud operator.

Decentralized and specialist operators

• Phala, Marlin, Oasis, Secret Network, Fluence: TEE marketplaces where nodes are community-operated, attestation is verified on-chain, and payment is usually crypto.
• CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe, TensorWave: GPU-specialist clouds. H100/H200 CC availability varies, and these often require bring-your-own orchestration.
• Tinfoil, Edgeless, Anjuna, Fortanix: layer atop the majors with hardened images and attestation UX.

Choosing a provider

The trust-is-not-free small print

Every cloud provider controls: - The BIOS and bootloader you cannot audit remotely (though they are measured and attested). - The attestation service endpoints (unless you bring your own verifier). - Key management infrastructure (unless you use split-key or external KMS). - Network routing and egress logging. TEEs do not hide traffic metadata. - Supply-chain access to silicon. A cloud can in principle receive silicon the vendor is not shipping elsewhere.

Confidential computing reduces the cloud's plaintext-access surface dramatically; it does not remove the cloud from your threat model. Pair with transparency logs, multi-vendor quorum, or on-chain verification when you need to actually minimize cloud trust.

Primary sources

• Azure confidential computing products
• AWS EC2: AMD SEV-SNP
• AWS Nitro Enclaves requirements
• Google Cloud Confidential VM supported configurations
• Google Cloud Confidential Space
• Oracle Cloud confidential computing
• IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers