Intel released the Heracles chip, which allows encrypted data to be processed without decrypting it, realizing the dream of anonymists.

Intel unveiled the first high‑performance chip for fully homomorphic encryption

The company announced a new accelerator called Heracles that can perform operations on encrypted data up to 5,000 times faster than standard server processors. The chip was built at the request of the U.S. military as a defense against potential quantum computer attacks and allows fully encrypted information to be processed without decryption, preserving confidentiality at every stage.

What is fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)?
* A promising technology that enables any computation on encrypted data without revealing it.
* Solves the trust problem with cloud services and AI: data remains private even during processing.
* The main hurdle is the extremely low performance of traditional CPUs/GPUs, often thousands to tens of thousands of times slower than working with plaintext.

Because of these limitations many companies are developing specialized FHE accelerators. Leading players and startups (Duality Technologies, Optalysys, Niobium Microsystems, etc.) are actively working on their own solutions.

How did “Heracles” come about?
* Development began five years ago; little was known about the chip before ISSCC.
* At an Intel conference it was announced that Heracles accelerates FHE calculations by 5,000× compared to top Xeons (e.g., a 24‑core Sapphire Rapids).

Technical details
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Processor | 3‑nm FinFET from Intel |
| Area | ~200 mm² (about 20× larger than competitors) |
| Memory | Two HBM modules of 24 GB each, total 48 GB |
| Cache | 64 MB shared cache for all tiles |
| Data bus | 9.6 TB/s inter‑tile |
| Stream to HBM | 819 GB/s |

The chip and memory are housed under a common water block and cooled with liquid coolant, giving it a look similar to a top GPU but designed for entirely different tasks.

Demonstration at ISSCC
* Example task – verifying voice registration in an encrypted voter database.
* Processing time – 14 µs on Heracles versus 15 ms on Xeon, i.e., over 1,000× speed‑up.
* Checking 100 million ballots reduces the time from 17 days to 23 minutes.

Significance for the industry
Heracles is the first FHE chip that works at “scale” rather than a laboratory prototype. Its launch is seen as a key step toward commercializing hardware platforms for FHE. If the technology becomes widely adopted, it could radically change approaches to privacy in cloud computing, data analytics, and machine learning by eliminating the need to sacrifice confidentiality for processing speed.