FortiGate G Series expands for AI workloads

Fortinet said on May 6 that it expanded its FortiGate G series with two new next-generation firewalls, the FortiGate 3500G and FortiGate 400G, aimed at organizations running AI-driven workloads and distributed hybrid networks. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said the products are designed to handle growing encrypted traffic, east-west data flows and performance demands across data centers and enterprise edges. Fortinet said the new systems are powered by its NP7 and SP5 processors and run on the FortiOS operating system. (fortinet.com) The announcement did not come on May 20, as some social posts suggested. Fortinet’s own newsroom lists the release on May 6, 2026, and describes the G series expansion as part of its broader push into AI security and high-throughput inspection. ### Which FortiGate models did Fortinet add? Fortinet named the FortiGate 3500G and FortiGate 400G as the new additions to the G series. The company said the pair is meant to extend high-performance security from the data center to “modern enterprise edges,” with flexible connectivity and hardware-enforced integrity protections. (fortinet.com) The May 6 release said the products are part of the company’s FortiGate G series portfolio, which Fortinet positions as a high-throughput firewall line for organizations that do not want to trade inspection depth for speed. (fortinet.com) Fortinet said the systems combine threat protection, integrated intelligence and hardware-based security in one platform. ### Why is Fortinet tying this launch to AI workloads? Fortinet said AI-driven workloads are changing traffic patterns inside enterprise and data-center environments, especially as encrypted internal traffic and east-west flows rise. (fortinet.com) In a separate solution brief, the company said GPU clusters, training pipelines and large-language-model applications generate large lateral traffic volumes that conventional inspection pipelines struggle to process without adding latency. Ken Xie, Fortinet’s founder and chief executive, said organizations modernizing for AI workloads and distributed environments need security platforms that can deliver “both performance and protection at scale.” He said the G series expansion is meant to help customers simplify architectures and protect AI deployments from the data center to the enterprise edge. (fortinet.com) ### What problem is Fortinet saying these firewalls solve? (fortinet.com) Fortinet said traditional firewall architectures are reaching their limits as encrypted traffic, east-west flows and AI-driven threats increase. The company said the new G series products are built on custom ASIC acceleration so customers can inspect traffic at high speed while keeping security controls turned on. The company also said the 3500G and 400G extend its Security Fabric with native shadow AI detection, which it described as real-time visibility into unsanctioned AI application usage. (fortinet.com) Fortinet said FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services and FortiOS 8.0 add machine-learning-based threat detection and inspection of MCP and agent-to-agent traffic for tighter control over AI data flows and access. ### What does “high encrypted traffic” mean in this context? (fortinet.com) Fortinet’s AI data-center brief said a high share of internal AI traffic is encrypted, which limits visibility unless a firewall can decrypt, inspect and re-encrypt flows at scale. The company said that matters because AI environments move sensitive data laterally across interconnected systems, not just in and out of a perimeter. That framing matches the company’s product pitch for the new G series: security appliances that can process dense, low-latency environments without forcing operators to disable inspection features. (fortinet.com) Fortinet did not disclose pricing in the May 6 release. ### Where does this fit in Fortinet’s broader 2026 product cycle? Fortinet’s newsroom shows the G series expansion alongside other 2026 AI-focused announcements, including FortiOS 8.0 on March 10 and an NVIDIA integration announcement on May 12. (fortinet.com) The company also introduced the FortiGate 3800G in November 2025 as part of a Secure AI Data Center offering. Fortinet said more technical details are available through its May 6 press release and related product materials for the FortiGate 3500G, FortiGate 400G and FortiOS 8.0, which are the next named reference points for customers evaluating the rollout. (fortinet.com 1) (fortinet.com 2)