VAST Data announced the result of nearly a decade of relentless innovation with the unveiling of the VAST AI Operating System, a revolutionary platform purpose-built to fuel the next wave of AI breakthroughs.
Since the beginning of computing, every major technological revolution has been defined by the emergence of a new operating system. From the PC, to mobile, to the cloud – a unified software layer has abstracted complexity, democratised the use of new hardware, and reshaped how the world computes, communicates and innovates.
Now, as AI redefines the fabric of business and society, the industry again finds itself at the dawn of a new computing paradigm – one where trillions of intelligent agents will reason, communicate, and act across a global grid of millions of GPUs that are woven across edge deployments, AI factories and cloud data centres. To make this world accessible, programmable, and operational at extreme scale, a new generation of intelligent systems requires a new software foundation.
This is the moment VAST Data was built for.
The launch of the VAST AI Operating System comes as the company has reached a historic milestone: the fastest path to $2 billion in cumulative bookings of any data company in history. With nearly 5x year-over-year growth in the first quarter of this year compared to last, and a cashflow-positive business model, VAST’s hypergrowth reflects the market’s demand for an operating system purpose-built to operationalise AI at unprecedented scale.
The VAST AI Operating System is the product of nearly ten years of engineering toward a single purpose: to create an intelligent platform architecture that can harness this new generation of AI supercomputing machinery and unlock the potential of AI at scale. Developed from a clean sheet of paper, the platform is built on VAST’s groundbreaking Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture – making it possible to completely parallelise AI and analytics workloads, federate clusters into a unified computing and data cloud and then feed new AI workloads with near-infinite amounts of data from one fast and affordable tier of storage. Today, DASE clusters support over 1 million GPUs around the world in many of the world’s most data intensive computing centres.
The scope of the AI OS is broad and will consolidate disparate legacy IT technologies into one simple and modern offering designed to democratise AI computing. What VAST was inventing from the start was conceived not as a collection of features, but as an entirely new computing substrate — one that unifies data, compute, messaging, and reasoning. A system built to capture data from the natural world at extreme scale, enrich it with AI-driven context in real time, and drive agentic workflows. Today, that invention takes shape as the VAST AI Operating System…a continuation of VAST’s pursuit toward building a Thinking Machine.
“This isn’t a product release — it’s a milestone in the evolution of computing,” said Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data. “We’ve spent the past decade reimagining how data and intelligence converge. Today, we’re proud to unveil the AI Operating System for a world that is no longer built around applications — but around agents.”
The AI Operating System consists of every aspect of a distributed system to run AI at global scale: a kernel to run platform services on from private to public cloud, a runtime to deploy AI agents with, eventing infrastructure for real-time event processing, messaging infrastructure, and a distributed file and database storage system that can be used for real-time data capture and analytics.
Introducing the VAST AgentEngine
This year, AI models and agents now come to life within the VAST AI Operating System. In 2024, VAST previewed the VAST InsightEngine – a service that extracts context from unstructured data using AI embedding tools. If the VAST InsightEngine prepares data for AI using AI, VAST AgentEngine is how AI now comes to life with data – an auto-scaling AI agent deployment runtime that equips users with a low-code environment to build intelligent workflows, select reasoning models, define agent tools, and operationalise reasoning.
The AgentEngine features a new AI agent tool server that provides support for agents to invoke data, metadata, functions, web search or other agents using them as MCP-compatible tools. AgentEngine allows agents to assume multiple personas with different purpose and security credentials, and provides secure, real-time access to different tools. The platform’s scheduler and fault-tolerant queuing mechanisms also ensure agent resilience against machine or service failure.
Finally, AgentEngine introduces massively-scalable agentic workflow observability – with VAST’s approach to parallel, distributed tracing – the VAST AI OS makes it simple for developers to enjoy a unified and simple view into massively-scaled and complex agentic pipelines.
Just as operating systems ship with pre-built utilities, the VAST AgentEngine will feature a set of open-source Agents that VAST will release, one per month, to help accelerate the journey to AI computing. Some personal assistants will be tailored to industry use cases, whereas others will be designed for general purpose use. Examples include:
- A reasoning chatbot, powered by all of an organisation’s VAST data
- A data engineering agent to curate data automatically
- A prompt engineer to help optimise AI workflow inputs
- An agent agent, to automate the deployment, evaluation and improvement of agents
- A compliance agent, to enforce data and activity level regulatory compliance
- An editor agent, to create rich media content
- A life sciences researcher, to assist with bioinformatic discovery
In the spirit of enabling organisations to build and build fast on the VAST AI Operating System, VAST Data will be hosting VAST Forward, a series of global workshops, both in-person and online, throughout the year. These workshops will include training on components of the Operating System and sessions on how to develop on the platform.
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