Cloudera announced a strategic partnership with VAST Data to deliver a unified AI factory, a scalable production environment where data is continuously ingested, refined, governed, and delivered to AI models for training and inference. This infrastructure is available for enterprises operating across on-premises environments and public clouds, enabling a consistent AI operating model while allowing organisations to deploy AI services wherever performance, compliance, and cost requirements are best met. The collaboration integrates Cloudera’s next-generation containerised data services with the VAST AI Operating System – which unifies high-performance storage, database, and global namespace capabilities to power large-scale AI, analytics, and mission-critical data workloads. This data-platform layer, based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, turns latent enterprise data into AI-ready data that fuels the AI factory.
As organisations race to deploy generative and agentic AI, many are discovering that traditional architectures were not designed to support continuous AI pipelines spanning data preparation, training, inference, and analytics. One consequence is GPU starvation, where expensive accelerator clusters sit idle waiting for data. The joint solution addresses this challenge by ensuring data can move efficiently through the AI lifecycle while keeping GPUs continuously fed with high-throughput, low-latency data, dramatically improving utilisation, performance, and return on investment.
Building the Enterprise AI Factory
Cloudera’s lakehouse architecture provides portable, containerised data services, including data engineering, streaming, analytics, machine learning, and AI, all deployable consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything architecture serves as the foundation of the VAST AI Operating System, delivering exabyte-scale data infrastructure, integrating vector database services with NVIDIA cuVS for GPU-accelerated vector indexing and search, and high-performance storage optimised for modern GPU clusters and AI workloads. Together, VAST’s AI OS, leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, with NVIDIA-accelerated computing, transforms latent enterprise data into activated AI-ready data, while Cloudera delivers data engineering, analytics, governance, and AI services on top.
Together, the companies deliver:
- A unified AI factory architecture from raw data ingestion to model deployment
- Consistent operations anywhere across data centres, private cloud, and public cloud
- Elimination of GPU starvation through ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency data pipelines
- Significantly improved compute efficiency by ensuring GPUs operate at sustained utilisation levels
- Superior storage performance at scale for structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets
- Secure private AI environments with enterprise governance and compliance
This architecture enables organisations to move from isolated AI experiments to production-grade AI systems that continuously transform enterprise data into actionable intelligence for training, inference, analytics, and agentic applications.
This partnership also furthers solutions that create private AI factories by combining NVIDIA AI infrastructure, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the VAST AI OS as the foundational data platform and enterprise data and AI services from Cloudera into an optimised solution for private and sovereign AI. The Cloudera AI Inference Service, as one of the solutions, accelerated by NVIDIA NIM microservices, enables organisations to bring AI to their data where they can deploy and scale any model, including the latest NVIDIA Nemotron open models.
Customers will be able to accelerate Apache Spark workloads with NVIDIA cuDF to transparently accelerate Cloudera Data Engineering workloads by allowing Spark jobs to leverage VAST’s high-throughput data services via GPU-accelerated processing, supporting even more AI workload optimisation.
For large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries, this represents a full “silicon-to-application” solution for building production-grade AI systems, anywhere.
Driving Significant Mutual Growth
The partnership combines 60 exabytes worth of customer-managed data, unlocking substantial new opportunities for both companies and their customers. This is coupled with an increasing enterprise demand for private AI infrastructure, creating a significant pipeline and future revenue growth opportunities.
“Enterprises are investing billions in GPUs, yet many struggle to achieve full utilisation due to data bottlenecks,” said Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer & GM, Applied AI at Cloudera. “Our partnership with VAST eliminates GPU starvation and enables customers to build true AI factories—where data flows seamlessly from ingestion to insight. ”
“Most enterprises already have the data they need for AI. The challenge is unlocking the value in data to create a continuous pipeline of AI inference, fine-tuning, and data analysis to build the next generation of intelligent applications,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Together, Cloudera and VAST are helping customers build AI factories that connect data, intelligence, and infrastructure into a single operational platform for AI across hybrid environments.”
The joint Cloudera–VAST AI factory solution is available immediately through both companies’ enterprise sales teams and partner ecosystems. Reference architectures, validated deployment patterns, and industry-specific solutions will continue to expand throughout 2026.
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