Vast Data and CoreWeave Forge $1.17 Billion Partnership to Revolutionize AI Infrastructure

Vast Data and CoreWeave team up to provide enhanced AI data services - SiliconANGLE

Vast Data and CoreWeave team up to provide enhanced AI data services Data infrastructure giant Vast Data Inc. said today it's expanding its collaboration with the cloud data center operator CoreWeave Inc., signing a $1.17 billion commercial agreement that fortifies VAST AI OS as the primary data foundation for cloud-based artificial intelligence workloads. CoreWeave has emerged as one of the darlings of Wall Street since going public earlier this year, growing its business exponentially on the back of the AI industry boom. The company operates a vast network of cloud-based data centers that are packed with Nvidia Corp.'s most advanced graphics processing units and other high-end AI accelerators. It rents this computing power to enterprises customers that need more oomph for their AI systems, serving as a direct competitor to public cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud. Vast Data is all about data storage, and it has been busy trying to position itself as the primary platform for AI data, which is essential fuel for large language models and generative AI systems. With Vast AI OS, it's leveraging its "Disaggregated and Shared-Everything" architecture, which separates storage media from compute resources, to create a kind of operating system for AI data. It allows customers to store nearly unlimited amounts of data that can be accessed independently of customers' computing resources, making it available to AI systems with much lower latency. Vast AI OS supports every kind of storage, including file, object, block, table and streaming data, and offers AI-specific capabilities such as serverless functions and vector search. The platform has emerged as a critical component of CoreWeave's data center infrastructure, providing the cloud company's customers with real-time access to enormous datasets, enabling more economic and lower-latency AI training and inference. CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo said the Vast AI OS underpins many aspects of how the company designs and delivers its cloud infrastructure. "This partnership enables us to deliver AI infrastructure that is the most performant, scalable and cost-efficient in the market," he promised. Due to Vast AI OS's scalable system architecture, CoreWeave says it can spin up the platform for customers in any of its data centers, providing them with an immediate, reliable and performant data foundation for the most demanding AI workloads. The expanded partnership will see CoreWeave work with Vast Data to provide even more sophisticated data services to their joint customers, including new features that can help to optimize data pipelines. With these new services, the companies say customers will be able to move even faster and scale more efficiently than before. AI workloads deployed at the kind of scale seen with cloud providers like CoreWeave require a very different approach to storage, said NAND Research analyst Steve McDowell. He told SiliconANGLE that at such scales it's critical to ensure that GPUs aren't constantly stopping and starting while waiting on the required data, and so traditional storage systems simply don't cut the mustard. "This is where specialist providers like Vast Data thrive," McDowell said. "It has blended the best capabilities of high-performance scalable parallel file systems with AI-optimized features designed to keep AI workflows from waiting on data." McDowell did say it's important to note that CoreWeave isn't wholly reliant on Vast Data for its data infrastructure. It also works with a company called WekaIO Inc., which is Vast Data's primary competitor, offering customers a choice of either platform. "CoreWeave's multivendor approach shows that there's still no single solution to meet the data challenges of AI at scale," the analyst said. Vast Data founder and Chief Executive Renen Hallak begged to differ, saying the expanded partnership means Vast AI OS will serve as the foundation for the world's most ambitious AI projects. "Our deep integration with CoreWeave is the result of a long-term commitment to working side by side at both the business and technical level," he said. "By aligning our roadmaps, we are delivering an AI platform that organizations cannot find anywhere else in the market."

Nvidia-backed Vast Data inks $1.17 billion AI deal with CoreWeave

Under the agreement, CoreWeave will use Vast as the primary data platform for its cloud infrastructure, which provides customers with access to graphics processing units (GPUs) for training and running AI models. AI startup Vast Data has signed a $1.17 billion commercial agreement with cloud provider CoreWeave, extending their existing partnership as demand for infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence systems grows, the company told Reuters. Under the agreement, CoreWeave will use Vast as the primary data platform for its cloud infrastructure, which provides customers with access to graphics processing units (GPUs) for training and running AI models. Vast says such contracts typically span three to five years but declined to disclose detailed financial terms. Vast Data builds software that helps companies store and process the large volumes of information used to train and run artificial intelligence systems, charging customers based on the capacity and features they use. The companies plan to align their product roadmaps to improve how data is stored and accessed for AI workloads to increase efficiency. The expanded partnership enables Vast to work more closely with CoreWeave while continuing to serve other major customers. Those include leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and other so-called "neocloud" firms like Nebius, as well as AI labs such as Elon Musk's xAI, Vast co-founder Jeff Denworth told Reuters in an interview. The deal underscores the growing investment in the infrastructure underpinning generative AI, where companies like Nvidia-backed CoreWeave and software providers such as Vast play a central role. The agreement provides a significant revenue stream for New York-based Vast Data, which has said it is free cash flow positive and reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue by January 2025. It could also accelerate the company's fundraising efforts. Reuters reported in August that Vast was in talks to raise several billion dollars in new capital at a valuation of up to $30 billion, with potential investors including Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG and Nvidia. Vast was last valued at $9.1 billion following a 2023 funding round. Investors see it as a potential IPO candidate after it hired former Shopify chief financial officer Amy Shapero last year.

VAST Data and CoreWeave sign $1.17bn agreement to power next-generation AI infrastructure

The agreement advances a shared mission to redefine the data and compute architecture powering AI Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data/Image: Supplied VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, has announced the signing of a commercial agreement worth $1.17bn billion with CoreWeave, the essential cloud for AI. The expanded partnership strengthens CoreWeave's long-standing commitment to the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS) as its primary data foundation, positioning VAST as a core component of CoreWeave's AI cloud infrastructure. Powered by the VAST AI OS, CoreWeave's infrastructure provides instant access to massive datasets, breakthrough performance, and cloud-scale economics for both training and inference workloads. With its infinitely scalable system architecture, CoreWeave can deploy VAST in any data center, supporting any customer requirement without concerns about platform reliability or scalability. In some of the world's most demanding computing environments, VAST and CoreWeave are working together to ensure that customers are always computing at peak performance. As part of this expanded collaboration, CoreWeave and VAST will jointly deliver advanced data services that span the full stack, enhancing data pipelines and enabling model builders with powerful design and performance capabilities. The two companies are developing next-generation AI infrastructure that allows customers to innovate faster, scale seamlessly, and operate with greater efficiency. "At VAST, we are building the data foundation for the most ambitious AI initiatives in the world," said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data. "Our deep integration with CoreWeave is the result of a long-term commitment to working side by side at both the business and technical level. By aligning our roadmaps, we are delivering an AI platform that organisations cannot find anywhere else in the market." "The VAST AI Operating System underpins key aspects of how we design and deliver our AI cloud," said Brian Venturo, co-founder and chief strategy officer of CoreWeave. "This partnership enables us to deliver AI infrastructure that is the most performant, scalable, and cost-efficient in the market, while reinforcing the trust and reliability of a data platform that our customers depend on for their most demanding workloads." The agreement advances a shared mission to redefine the data and compute architecture powering AI. By combining CoreWeave's GPU-accelerated cloud infrastructure with the VAST AI OS, the companies are creating a new class of intelligent data architecture that supports continuous training, real-time inference, and large-scale data processing for mission-critical industries.