At VAST Forward 2026 in Singapore, VAST Data used the stage alongside NVIDIA and Cisco to position itself at the heart of a new push to collapse storage, compute and orchestration into a single AI infrastructure stack as regional players, like Australian AI factory start-up Firmus, scale sovereign facilities across Asia-Pacific.
The Singapore event underscored a clear theme: as AI factories expand from single clusters to multi-site, multi-cloud systems running tens of thousands of GPUs, the competitive battleground is shifting from components to tightly integrated, globally orchestrated platforms.
The headline announcement for APAC was an end-to-end, fully CUDA-accelerated AI data stack delivered through an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA. VAST said its AI Operating System (AI OS) will now run directly on NVIDIA-powered servers, with the new CNode-X platform embedding GPU acceleration across data services and compute.
“Ten years ago, we set out to build a system that could continuously refine data into intelligence and action,” said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data. “By accelerating both compute and the data paths inside the VAST AI OS with NVIDIA, we’re giving customers a faster, simpler way to operationalise retrieval, analytics, and agentic workflows as one coherent pipeline so AI can move from pilot to durable, production systems.”
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang framed the collaboration as part of a broader redesign of AI-era infrastructure. “NVIDIA is reinventing every pillar of computing for AI. With VAST Data, we’re transforming the storage of AI infrastructure,” he said. “CNode-X is CUDA-accelerated at every layer to give AI agents persistent memory so they can work on complex problems over days or weeks, and eventually years, without forgetting.”
The stack integrates NVIDIA cuDF for GPU-accelerated SQL execution, cuVS for vector search acceleration, NIM microservices for scalable AI pipelines, and support for NVIDIA’s Context Memory Storage (CMX) platform. VAST claims early benchmarking of its Sirius query engine shows up to a 44% reduction in query time and up to an 80% reduction in query cost.
Cisco and Supermicro will bring CNode-X systems to market through certified OEM configurations. “AI doesn’t scale on isolated components. It scales through integrated systems,” said Jeremy Foster, SVP and general manager, Cisco Compute.
New agentic AI services
Beyond raw acceleration, VAST also introduced two new services aimed at operationalising agentic AI: PolicyEngine and TuningEngine. PolicyEngine enforces fine-grained, inline controls over agent access and communication, maintaining what the company describes as a zero-trust posture with tamper-proof logging. TuningEngine, meanwhile, enables automated fine-tuning and reinforcement learning loops within the VAST AI OS, allowing models to evolve based on real-world telemetry and feedback.
“Just as people are always learning, so should tomorrow’s applications,” said Jeff Denworth, co-founder at VAST Data (above). He described the updated platform as “a thinking machine that safeguards every interaction and learns from every outcome.”
To address the growing sprawl of AI infrastructure across regions and providers, VAST also unveiled Polaris, a global control plane designed to orchestrate distributed AI environments across public cloud, neocloud and on-premises data centres. Built as a Kubernetes-based control plane with a lightweight agent on each node, Polaris aims to turn multi-cluster deployments into a single operational system.
“AI infrastructure has outgrown the idea of a single deployment in a single location,” said Jonsi Stefansson, general manager, cloud solutions at VAST Data. “Polaris establishes a global control plane that makes distributed AI infrastructure operationally coherent.”
Firmus chooses VAST
The product and service announcements come as infrastructure specialists across APAC scale up sovereign AI capacity. Earlier this month, Firmus Technologies Group selected the VAST AI Operating System as the foundational data layer for its next-generation AI factories across Australia and Singapore, built on the NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference design.
“At the scale of thousands of GPUs, small inefficiencies compound quickly,” said Daniel Kearney, CTO at Firmus. “We selected the VAST AI Operating System because it is architected for that reality: high throughput, disaggregated…and built to sustain GPU efficiency as we expand sovereign AI capacity.”