Nvidia-backed VAST Data has struck a major $1.17 billion partnership with CoreWeave, one of the fastest-rising players in the AI cloud market. The long-term agreement makes VAST the primary data platform powering CoreWeave’s infrastructure.
For customers, this means faster access to GPUs, more reliable performance, and a smoother path to building and running advanced AI models at scale. The deal also strengthens VAST’s growing influence across top-tier partners, including AWS, Nebius, and xAI.
VAST has been pushing a vision that goes far beyond acting as a high-performance storage provider. The company wants to create the “Operating System for the Thinking Machine,” a foundation capable of organising massive amounts of structured and unstructured data.
Its architecture is built around retrieval-augmented generation, giving AI systems the ability to pull information instantly and turn static data into dynamic intelligence. This approach is becoming essential as enterprises shift toward more complex, data-driven AI workloads.
By working closely with CoreWeave, VAST is tightening the connection between storage, data management, and GPU-driven compute power. The partnership is designed to help enterprises handle the growing volume of AI-related data while keeping performance predictable and efficient.
It fills a critical gap in the neocloud ecosystem and adds more depth to CoreWeave’s already strong hardware-rich platform. For both companies, the collaboration sets the stage for a new level of scale and flexibility as AI adoption accelerates.
The timing is especially meaningful for VAST. The company recently surpassed $200 million in annual revenue and reached positive cash flow, a milestone that comes just as it negotiates a multi-billion-dollar funding round.
Investors such as CapitalG and Nvidia are backing a potential valuation leap to around $30 billion, more than triple its last valuation of $9.1 billion in 2023. This new partnership adds more weight to VAST’s growth story and positions it as a strong candidate for a future IPO, following the path CoreWeave took when it went public earlier this year.
By pairing VAST’s intelligent data layer with CoreWeave’s GPU-packed cloud, the two companies are creating a powerful foundation for the next generation of AI development.
This move signals VAST’s ambition to become the backbone of modern AI infrastructure, supporting faster, smarter, and more scalable innovation across the industry.
Another important angle is how this partnership reshapes competitive dynamics in the AI cloud market. As demand for GPU capacity explodes, differentiation is no longer just about hardware availability. Enterprises now care deeply about how data moves, how fast models can retrieve context, and how efficiently systems scale under heavy load. By locking in VAST as its primary data platform, CoreWeave is signaling that data architecture is becoming just as strategic as compute.
The deal also reinforces VAST’s growing role as a neutral infrastructure layer across competing AI ecosystems. Working simultaneously with hyperscalers, neoclouds, and frontier AI labs positions VAST as connective tissue rather than a point solution. That neutrality could prove valuable as enterprises try to avoid vendor lock-in while still demanding performance that matches purpose-built AI stacks.
For CoreWeave, the agreement strengthens its pitch to large enterprises and AI-native companies that want predictable performance at scale. As training runs grow larger and inference workloads become more latency-sensitive, tight integration between data and compute can reduce bottlenecks that slow deployment. This could help CoreWeave move upmarket and win longer-term infrastructure commitments.
Taken together, the partnership reflects a broader shift in AI infrastructure thinking. The next phase of AI growth will not be driven by GPUs alone, but by how intelligently data is stored, accessed, and activated. By aligning early and deeply, VAST and CoreWeave are betting that the future of AI belongs to platforms that treat data as a first-class system, not an afterthought.
