VAST Data

VAST Amplify — reclaiming stranded SSD capacity during the flash shortage (launched January 27, 2026). Program targeting the 2026 NAND supply crunch (30 TB SSD prices rose ~257% from mid-2025 to early 2026): existing NVMe drives get repurposed into E-Boxes/JBOFs, and DASE's global similarity-based dedup + erasure coding at only 12% overhead yields up to 6× effective capacity without new flash purchases. CEO Hallak has framed the shortage as "a wake-up call to the flash vendors" — VAST claims it would need flash supply growing 200% YoY to meet demand. Per VAST Data — VAST Amplify launch and Blocks & Files — VAST on the flash shortage.

The platform is now six engines on DASE — AgentEngine ships in 2026. Series F coverage detailed the "AI Operating System" build-out: DataStore, DataBase, DataSpace, DataEngine, InsightEngine, and AgentEngine — a production AI-agent deployment layer with MCP protocol integration — with PolicyEngine and TuningEngine slated by end of year. Storage vendor → agent-platform vendor is the trajectory to watch. Per Supercomputing News — VAST's $30B and the middle layer of AI.

Series F at $30B valuation — $1B round led by NVIDIA's AI-storage bet. Per VAST Data's press release on the Series F financing (April 22, 2026), VAST closed a $1B Series F at a $30B valuation. NVIDIA participation flagged across coverage as the marquee AI-infrastructure signal — VAST's positioning as the unified storage substrate for AI-training data loops is now backed by the GPU vendor with the most direct interest in storage stops being the bottleneck.

"Collapsing the Stack" strategy — own the AI data loop end-to-end. VAST's strategic frame for 2026 is consolidating the AI-data-pipeline tiers (object + file + database + lineage) onto a single all-flash platform — competing not just with object stores like FlashBlade and StorageGRID but with the broader "AI data lake + feature store + RAG infrastructure" surface that has historically been a multi-vendor patchwork. Per VAST — N=1: How VAST Built the De Facto Data Layer for AI.

The financials behind the $30B (June 2026 detail) + the CoreWeave anchor. Coverage of the Series F put hard numbers on the valuation: $4B+ cumulative software bookings, $500M+ committed ARR, ~90% gross margins, and 300%+ net revenue retention — plus a landmark $1.17B commercial agreement with CoreWeave that makes VAST the default storage supplier to GPU-heavy neoclouds. Per Calcalist — VAST valuation soars to $30B and Futuriom — VAST hits $30B.

From storage vendor to "AI Operating System" — native on BlueField-4. VAST's DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything) architecture — stateless compute over a shared NVMe-oF flash pool — now bundles storage + a transactional database + a compute engine as one platform. Running a VAST CNode natively on NVIDIA BlueField-4 (STX reference architecture) enables zero-copy NVMe→GPU-VRAM paths via GPUDirect Storage + RDMA; VAST-reported benchmarks show a 90% inference-efficiency gain and a 20× Time-to-First-Token improvement when offloading KV caches to the tier. This is the same DPU-offload pattern the ROS2 ACM paper validates academically. Per VAST — N=1 data layer for AI.

The $30B software model has a name: "Gemini" — hardware and software are sold separately. Customers license VAST's software by storage capacity (TB/PB) and compute (CPU cores) on 4-5 year upfront terms, while hardware is purchased separately from partners at transparent at-cost pricing — the inverse of the classic storage-appliance bundle. Per TSG Invest — VAST Data Stock: $30B Valuation (tertiary source, no independent corroboration on the "Gemini" naming — flagged as such).

BlueField-4 KV-cache offload cuts power draw ~75% alongside the throughput gains. Independent research coverage of VAST's NVIDIA CMX (Inference Context Memory Storage Platform) integration puts a number on the efficiency side of the BlueField-4 DPU story already on the node: a 75% reduction in power consumption for KV-cache operations, on top of the previously reported 90% inference-efficiency gain and 20x TTFT improvement. Per NAND Research — VAST's Novel Approach to NVIDIA's CMX Platform.

AIC is building appliance hardware around VAST's DASE stack. AIC showcased its CERES Platform — NVMe storage built for VAST's DASE architecture — at NVIDIA GTC 2026, targeting AI data pipelines, RAG, and real-time analytics; a concrete sign of a hardware-partner ecosystem forming around VAST's software-defined model. Per AIC — AI Storage Platforms for Scalable Inference at NVIDIA GTC 2026 (tertiary, republished by multiple outlets incl. Yahoo Finance and Morningstar). Sources: VAST Data — VAST Amplify launch · Blocks & Files — VAST on the flash shortage (March 3, 2026) · Supercomputing News — VAST's $30B bet on the middle layer · VAST Series F at $30B valuation (press release) · VAST — N=1: The De Facto Data Layer for AI · Calcalist — VAST $30B / $1B raise · Futuriom — VAST hits $30B valuation