VAST Data - Experts & Thought Leaders

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announces VAST DataEnclave, the confidential AI capability of the VAST DataEngine, built on NVIDIA Confidential Computing, with the support of ecosystem partners including top AI model builders, AI clouds, AI security and AI hardware providers. By enabling deployment inside customer data centres or trusted cloud hardware, including environments where leading AI models could not previously operate, VAST Data, in collaboration with NVIDIA and partners, is bringing proprietary and open AI models across a range of modalities to the world’s most sensitive data – while giving customers control over cost, performance, model selection and data privacy, and giving model builders reach into environments they could never serve before. Highly regulated industries Across financial services, healthcare, government and other highly regulated industries, some of the world’s most valuable data remains inside tightly controlled environments where moving it to an external AI service is impractical or prohibited. That creates a fundamental challenge for AI: sensitive data often cannot move to where leading models run, while model builders cannot distribute proprietary models into infrastructure they do not trust. VAST DataEnclave extends the VAST AI Operating System to resolve this impasse with a hardware-isolated secure runtime and cryptographic attestation that verifies the environment and its enforced policy before sensitive assets, such as proprietary models and sensitive data, are decrypted and loaded into the secure enclave container for analysis, where they remain protected in CPU and GPU memory during processing. Customer data keys remain under customer control, model keys and weights remain within the model builder’s trust domain, and infrastructure operators and administrators cannot access either while they are being processed. Making secure management Looking ahead, today's announcement expands the range of advanced models organisations can deploy within their own environments, while advancing VAST's broader AI Operating System vision, in which models are managed as a logical resource alongside data rather than as applications that simply sit on top of the infrastructure. As organisations adopt ecosystems of specialised models, each fit for a different purpose, priced differently and subject to different levels of trust, the AI OS will increasingly need to pair the right model with the right task and govern those models across environments: determining where they run, what data they can access, who or what can use them and the policies under which they operate. As organisations increasingly fine-tune their own models and agents generate specialised intelligence from their interactions, model weights become a new class of enterprise intellectual property, making secure management at scale an increasingly important function of the operating system. Fine-tuned models "Models are becoming a resource the operating system has to manage, the same way it manages data," said Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data. "That means knowing which model fits which task, what it can see, who can use it and under what rules, and doing all of that inside the same security and operational boundaries an enterprise applies to everything else. Bringing leading AI models securely to the world's most sensitive data is where this starts. Where it leads is a world where every organisation is managing an ecosystem of fine-tuned models that represent its true intellectual property. The VAST AI Operating System is what keeps them secure, governed and useful." Conventional encryption protects model weights while they are stored and while they move across the network. Confidential computing extends encryption and protects data during execution. NVIDIA Confidential Computing, now in its third generation on Hopper, Blackwell, and Rubin platforms, ensures that sensitive data and models are only released during execution after the workload is verified and a secure enclave has been established. Trusted execution environments VAST DataEnclave uses NVIDIA Confidential Computing to create a secure container runtime and attestation service directly within the VAST DataEngine. Proprietary models execute inside secure enclaves established through CPU and GPU trusted execution environments. Key capabilities include: Hardware-Isolated Execution: Protects workloads inside confidential virtual machines and containers, using NVIDIA Confidential Computing to encrypt guest memory, GPU memory and NVLink traffic while isolating active data and models from infrastructure operators, administrators and other tenants sharing the same hardware. Verify-Before-Decrypt Attestation: Cryptographically verifies the trusted execution environment – including NVIDIA GPU attestation – before releasing decryption keys, ensuring sensitive assets are accessible only to approved workloads running in a trusted environment. Independent Key Control: Enables enterprises and model builders to maintain their respective keys within their own trust domains through Bring Your Own Key Management System (KMS) integrations so each party controls and enforces policy on its own assets. This protects an enterprise’s own fine-tuned weights, which are fast becoming critical IP, as much as a model builder’s base weights. Connected or Air-Gapped Deployment: Supports connected or fully air-gapped environments with DataEnclave deployments using attestation services built on the open CNCF Trustee stack, or in partnership with Fortanix via its Confidential AI infrastructure for fully sovereign AI. Governed and Auditable by Design: Records attestation events, key releases and enclave lifecycle actions in a tamper-proof, queryable audit trail in the VAST DataBase, providing visibility into what ran, where and under what verified policy without exposing protected data or weights. Secure Agent Sandboxes: The same DataEngine secure runtime provides isolated execution environments for AI agents through VAST AgentEngine, enforcing policy over the data, systems and tools agents can access and the actions they can take. Unlike people, agents are not accountable for their actions, so they need identity, a contained runtime and observability into when, how and why they each took action, plus auditability if something went wrong. Combining hardware isolation "Model weights are fast becoming the most valuable intellectual property in the world. Base weights define the value of frontier models, while fine-tuned weights will increasingly represent the proprietary intelligence of AI-driven enterprises," said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. "As the stakes get higher, so does the need to secure enterprise data so customers can apply the most intelligent AI models against it. Today, VAST Data - in partnership with NVIDIA - is moving the industry forward with a comprehensive approach to verifying previously untrusted computing environments and unlocking the ability to run any model against any data, anywhere." VAST DataEnclave extends confidential execution across the infrastructure where AI models and sensitive data are processed, combining hardware isolation and verifiable attestation to protect both while they are in use. Customer-controlled environments “Enterprise data is essential to accurate, usable AI – and keeping business data confidential is critical to protecting IP in the age of agents. VAST Data’s integration of NVIDIA Confidential Computing delivers protection for both enterprises and model builders, providing security, identity, permissions, governance and compliance as a foundation of the agent architecture.” – Justin Boitano, Vice President of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA. VAST is bringing together model builders, AI clouds, AI security, and infrastructure providers around a shared architecture for customer-controlled environments. Customers can now execute on their AI strategies without running into boundaries that previously cut off access to cloud-hosted models. At the same time, they can bring these newly available models within their own carefully constructed boundaries to manage cost, security, and other operational concerns. Confidential compute strategy “Nscale and VAST have worked together for years to build AI environments where enterprises and governments retain control of their data. DataEnclave takes that a step further, combining Nscale’s sovereign AI cloud infrastructure with VAST’s attestation-based architecture so frontier models and sensitive data can come together securely in a verified environment. That opens up workloads that were previously out of reach and expands what sovereign AI infrastructure can deliver.” – Tom Burke, Chief Revenue Officer, Nscale. "Customers around the world have unique regulatory and sovereignty requirements, and they are asking for AI that is encrypted end-to-end—not just at rest but in motion and during inference. Cohere has prioritised confidential compute for some time, and by working with VAST we can now bring that same level of security and governance to any data center, wherever customers choose to deploy. Together we are building a confidential compute strategy that gives customers more choice and more control, so they can run our models and the agents they build on North where their data already lives: their infrastructure, their jurisdiction, their rules." – Frank O'Dowd, Chief Revenue and Commercial Officer at Cohere. Most sensitive data “CrowdStrike SafeMind models are trained on the world’s largest pureplay cyber dataset, and that intelligence relies on the trust built around it. Defenders in regulated industries want to put these models to work against their most sensitive data, inside their own boundaries, while maintaining control of their data and protecting the models themselves. VAST’s attestation-based approach brings model weights and enterprise data together in a verified environment while keeping both protected and under their respective owners’ control. That’s what it takes to put frontier security models to work where the stakes are highest.” – Dr. Bartley Richardson, Chief AI and Autonomous Systems Officer, CrowdStrike. “The most sensitive data in the world sits in tables. Confidential computing turns trust from a promise into a proof, and that's the difference between AI that regulated industries can pilot and AI they can actually put into production. The guarantee comes from the architecture, not our word. Fundamental's Large Tabular Model, NEXUS, can run directly inside a bank's or health system's own infrastructure, in a sealed execution environment where our model and their records are exposed to neither party, working in environments we could never have reached otherwise." – Jeremy Fraenkel, CEO of Fundamental. "Video is where an enormous amount of institutional knowledge lives, and it is also the data that is hardest to move. Archives, sensor feeds and full-motion video sit in environments that are disconnected by design. TwelveLabs built our video intelligence models Marengo and Pegasus to run wherever that video already is, with no degradation in capability. With VAST DataEnclave, we can bring video intelligence into the most restricted environments while keeping our models protected and our customers' footage entirely under their control." – Jae Lee, CEO & Co-founder, TwelveLabs. Accelerated computing systems VAST DataEnclave also enables AI cloud providers worldwide to deliver attested, sovereign environments where model builders, enterprises, and governments retain control over their IP and data within their own jurisdictions. Because isolation is enforced in hardware, sovereign and regional AI clouds can establish verifiable trust without dedicating entire machines to a single tenant, and can offer the newest accelerated computing systems, such as NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure, from facilities operated within national borders. This new VAST AI OS capability also provides OEMs the opportunity to deliver integrated confidential AI infrastructure that brings together trusted execution, accelerated computing and VAST-powered data infrastructure. VAST DataEnclave is being previewed today and will ship in Q1 2027 through VAST Data and participating OEM partners, including Cisco and Supermicro.

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announced the availability of VAST Foundation Stacks, a new open source library that augments and extends NVIDIA AI Blueprints into production-ready pipeline implementations that run natively on the VAST AI Operating System. NVIDIA AI Blueprints NVIDIA AI Blueprints provide developers with a foundational starting point for building advanced AI applications and intelligent agents, leveraging NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to rapidly prototype, customise, and deploy domain-specific AI workflows with minimal integration effort. VAST Foundation stacks extend these blueprints into production-ready templates, enabling organisations to deploy and operate NVIDIA-powered pipelines natively on the VAST AI Operating System. Developers can now focus on the business logic that connects AI to their environment instead of assembling the underlying infrastructure and platform layers required to support it, enabling teams to deliver AI applications faster. Enterprises are racing to operationalise proven AI patterns, but many reference examples still require extensive integration before they can run securely and reliably in production. Teams often must stitch together fragmented infrastructure, orchestration layers and data services to make these AI applications production-ready. VAST AI operating system VAST Foundation stacks address this challenge by extending NVIDIA AI Blueprints into repeatable, enterprise-ready implementations designed to run natively on the VAST AI operating system. By unifying data access, database services, compute orchestration, eventing, and pipeline execution in a single environment, VAST enables organisations to deploy scalable AI pipelines without building complex infrastructure from scratch.  These Foundation stacks can be seamlessly and repeatedly deployed anywhere the VAST AI OS runs, including in the cloud as well as on-premises via VAST's newly announced CNode-X platforms, as part of the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.  Foundations stacks The first Foundation Stacks are based on NVIDIA AI Blueprints for Video Search and Summarisation (VSS) and NVIDIA AI-Q: The VSS-based VAST Foundation stack enables organisations to ingest massive volumes of live or archived video and extract insights through semantic indexing, summarisation, and interactive Q&A, powered by the high-performance data and pipeline services of the VAST AI Operating System.  The AI-Q based VAST Foundation stack provides a foundation for building custom AI researchers that can operate across private, enterprise data sources, synthesising hours of research in minutes while leveraging the VAST AI OS for persistent and secure context, scalable reasoning pipelines, and trusted agent execution. Expert insights “NVIDIA AI Blueprints have given the market an important starting point for building next-generation applications, but enterprises still need a production-ready way to deploy and operate those capabilities at scale,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “With VAST Foundation Stacks, VAST is taking the architectural patterns behind leading NVIDIA Blueprints and giving customers a faster path from experimentation to production for scalable AI pipelines, video intelligence, and agentic AI systems.” “As enterprises transition to production AI at scale, preparing enterprise data for AI has become one of the biggest challenges,” said Adel El Hallak, Vice President, Product at NVIDIA. “Turning data into AI-ready pipelines needs to be done continuously and requires full-stack acceleration across compute, networking and software. By extending NVIDIA AI Blueprints with the VAST AI Operating System, customers can prepare and serve data so intelligent agents are always working off the most recent and accurate information.” Releasing stacks In addition to the available VSS and AI-Q implementations, VAST plans to release additional Foundation stacks in the coming months, including industry-focused examples.  VAST Foundation stacks will be available through a public GitHub repository, with interactive demos and planned sandbox environments for customers and partners.

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, announced at Microsoft Ignite a collaboration with Microsoft to power the next wave of agentic AI. Available soon to Azure customers, the VAST AI OS provides a simple way to deploy high-performance, scalable AI infrastructure in the cloud. Enterprises will be able to access VAST’s complete suite of data services in Azure, including unified storage, data cataloging, and database capabilities to support complex AI workflows. This integration will enable organisations to manage data seamlessly across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, delivering the scale, intelligence, and automation required to accelerate AI innovation. VAST AI Operating System The VAST AI Operating System will run on Azure infrastructure, enabling customers to deploy and operate it using the same tools, governance, security, and billing frameworks they have become accustomed to. The solution will deliver unified management, consistent performance, and Azure-grade reliability. “This collaboration with Microsoft reflects our shared vision for the future of AI infrastructure, where performance, scale, and simplicity converge to enable enterprises to transform their business with agentic AI,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Becoming an Azure Partner represents the first milestone in that journey. Customers will be able to unify their data and AI pipelines across environments with the same power, simplicity, and performance they expect from VAST, now with the reach, elasticity, and reliability of Microsoft’s global cloud.” Advantages of the capabilities of the VAST AI OS Azure customers will be able to take full advantage of the capabilities of the VAST AI OS running on Azure, including: Built for Agentic AI: Leverage VAST InsightEngine and AgentEngine to run intelligent, data-driven workflows directly where data lives. InsightEngine delivers stateless, high-performance compute and database services that accelerate vector search, RAG pipelines, and data preparation. AgentEngine orchestrates autonomous agents operating on real-time data streams, enabling continuous AI reasoning across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Performance at Scale for Model Builders: Designed for the demands of model training and inference, VAST AI OS keeps Azure GPU and CPU clusters saturated with high-throughput data services, intelligent caching, and metadata-optimized I/O to ensure predictable performance from pilot to multi-region scale. VAST benefits from the latest Azure Infrastructure solutions including the Laos VM Series using Azure Boost Accelerated Networking. Seamless Hybrid AI Workflows: An exabyte-scale DataSpace creates a unified global namespace that eliminates data silos and enables effortless data mobility. Customers can instantly burst from on-premises to Azure for GPU-accelerated workloads without migration or reconfiguration. Unified Data Access: VAST’s DataStore supports file (NFS, SMB), object (S3), and block protocols, while the VAST DataBase combines transactional performance with the query speed of a warehouse and the economics of a data lake, allowing diverse workloads to run on one platform without compromise. Elastic, Cost-Efficient Architecture: VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) design enables independent scaling of compute and storage resources within Azure. Combined with built-in Similarity Reduction, the platform minimises storage footprint and reduces cost for large-scale AI infrastructure. Azure’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure “VAST’s AI Operating System running on Azure will give Azure customers a high-performance, scalable platform built on the Laos VM Series using Azure Boost that seamlessly extends on-premises AI pipelines into Azure’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure,” said Aung Oo, Vice President, Azure Storage at Microsoft. “Many AI model builders in the world leverage VAST for its scalability, breakthrough performance, and AI-native capabilities. This collaboration can help our mutual customers streamline operations, reduce costs, and accelerate time-to-insight for AI workloads of every size.” Future of AI infrastructure As Microsoft continues to invest in the future of AI infrastructure, including its own custom silicon initiatives, VAST will work closely with the Azure team to align on next-generation platform requirements. This collaboration positions VAST as a strategic element of Microsoft’s broader AI computing strategy, helping to unlock the full potential of emerging innovations in compute. Together, the companies will aim to ensure that future AI systems, regardless of the processor or model architecture, are fuelled by an AI operating system built for scale, performance, and simplicity.  Upcoming joint appearances Renen Hallak, VAST Data Founder and CEO, will be at Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco and available for joint customer meetings, to discuss how Azure and the VAST AI Operating System will enable enterprises to operationalise agentic AI at global scale. At Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis, VAST Data will host Andrew Jones, Engineering Leader, Future Supercomputing & AI Capabilities, on November 19 in a conversation exploring how Azure AI and modern data strategies are shaping the AI cloud. Register to join the breakfast session and be part of the discussion on the future of AI infrastructure. Representatives from both VAST and Microsoft will also deliver technical presentations and demos in their respective booths throughout the event. Learn more by visiting VAST Booth #3204 and Microsoft Booth #1627.