VAST Data Unveils AI OS Platform Purpose-built to Fuel Next Wave of AI

VAST Data Ltd. announced the result of nearly a decade of relentless innovation with the unveiling of the VAST AI OS, a 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, democratized 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 centers. 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 OS 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 1st quarter of this year compared to last, and a cashflow-positive business model, the company’s hypergrowth reflects the market’s demand for an OS purpose-built to operationalize AI at unprecedented scale.

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The VAST AI OS is the product of nearly 10 years of engineering toward a single purpose: to create an intelligent platform architecture that can harness this new-genof AI supercomputing machinery and unlock the potential of AI at scale. Developed from a clean sheet of paper, the platform is built on the firm’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, the world’s 1st true parallel distributed system architecture – making it possible to completely parallelize 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 centers.

The scope of the AI OS is broad and will consolidate disparate legacy IT technologies into one simple and modern offering designed to democratize 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 the company’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 and CEO, 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 OS 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 VAST AgentEngine

This year, AI models and agents now come to life within the VAST AI OS. In 2024, the company 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, 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 operationalize 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 the company’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.

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Just as OSs ship with pre-built utilities, the VAST AgentEngine will feature a set of open-source Agents that the firm will release, 1/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 organization’s VAST data
• A data engineering agent to curate data automatically
• A prompt engineer to help optimize 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 organizations to build and build fast on the VAST AI OS, 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 OS and sessions on how to develop on the platform. 

Resources: 
Blog: The Grand Unification Theory of AI Infrastructure: Part II, by Jeff Denworth 
Blog : Introducing AgentEngine by Brian Verkley
Video: Introducing the VAST AI Operating System with Renen Hallak     
Video: Inside the VAST AI OS with Jeff Denworth     
Demo: The VAST AI OS Demo & Walkthrough with Andy Pernsteiner (video)
Events: Register to join us on the VAST Forward Global World Tour