The National Security Agency’s (NSA) Hybrid Compute Initiative (HCI) launched in 2021 won praise today from NSA Director Gen. Timothy Haugh who said the program represents the “future model” for the agency because it maximizes NSA’s ability to quickly leverage industry advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies.
Gen. Haugh – who also heads U.S. Cyber Command under a dual-hat arrangement – talked about the HCI program during remarks at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington.
NSA’s HCI program is modernizing the agency’s IT technology base by moving some of its intelligence data to cloud services, while also maintaining some of that data in internal servers. The agency in 2022 awarded a $10 billion contract to Amazon Web Services as part of the HCI effort.
When asked about HCI in connection with NSA’s ability to harness AI and other developing capabilities, Haugh said today, “I think hybrid computing initiative is a really good example of what it will look like for our future.”
“There are going to be some very unique technology things that will be bespoke within the intelligence community,” the general said, “but we have to be able to leverage the rapid advancements that are occurring in industry.”
“From a hybrid compute perspective, what we want to be able to do is tailor our ability to just leverage industry’s advancements,” he said.
“As industry continues to advance, in this case, from a compute perspective and overall cloud services, we need to be able to ensure that our applications, our data, is consistent with how that commercial industry will evolve,” he said.
“We cannot ask industry to adapt to us,” he said, rather, “we have to adapt industry so that we can take every update, every advancement, and leverage it in a more rapid and coherent way.”
The HCI program, he said, “is foundational” to those goals.
“We also see that as a model when we talk to our foreign partners, which is how do we also leverage that as glue between us to be able to compliantly share information” with those partners, Haugh said.
“So we see really this as a future model, because for us, it’s all going to be about speed, and certainly that is what industry is capitalizing on,” he said.
“We have to ride that wave of technology advancement, because the determining factor in the future is not going to be about size,” the general said. “It’s going to be about speed. The Hybrid Computing Initiative is a foundational example of how we’ll leverage industry.”
