Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving Seattle-area businesses, founded in 2005, and helps clients evaluate AI hosting decisions, including where and how a “private” deployment is actually run.
“Private” describes the front end. It says nothing about the back end.
A growing number of vendors now offer “private” AI hosting, aimed at businesses that do not want their data touching a shared public model. That is a reasonable instinct, but the word “private” in that pitch usually describes the front end: your own model instance, your own access controls, your own API key. It says nothing on its own about the physical or virtual infrastructure that instance actually runs on.
Much of the infrastructure being stood up quickly to meet demand for “private” AI hosting runs on shared virtualization, where one physical server hosts many customers’ workloads side by side, separated only by the hypervisor layer. It does not matter how secure the public-facing side of that system is, or how well-encrypted your connection to it is, if the isolation between tenants on the same physical hardware is weak. A bad actor who gains a foothold in a neighboring tenant’s workload on the same hardware may be able to reach yours directly, bypassing every control you built on your own side entirely.
The vault with a drywall ceiling
Picture a bank vault with reinforced walls, a time lock and an armed guard at the door, in a building where the floor above is rented out to whoever pays for it, and the vault’s ceiling is ordinary drywall. Every visible, front-door control can be excellent and still miss the point, because the actual weakness was never at the door.
That is not a claim that any specific vendor’s virtualization is insecure – it is a caution about a category of infrastructure that has been scaling faster than its security practices in some cases, and it is worth checking rather than assuming either way.
What to actually ask before signing
Before committing sensitive data to a “private” AI hosting arrangement, ask what tenancy model actually runs underneath it: is your workload on genuinely dedicated hardware, or on shared virtualization with other customers, and if the latter, what specifically isolates your workload from theirs at the hypervisor level? A vendor that cannot answer that question in specifics has not necessarily done anything wrong, but you have not yet learned what you actually need to know before trusting it with data you cannot afford to expose.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our AI integration work deals with – talk to us about yours.
