VAST Data on Wednesday announced what it says are the fruits of a decade of research: An intelligent platform architecture that can harness a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing machinery that “unlock the potential of AI at scale.”
The platform, built on VAST’s Disaggregated and Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, is intended to consolidate disparate legacy IT technologies into a simple and modern offering that would democratize AI computing.
“In some respects, we are taking a step back from the inventions we created, and attempting to put a bow on the new things that are coming to market,” VAST co-founder Jeff Denworth said in a video interview. “We are not announcing trees, as bringing perspective to the forest. Imagine an infrastructure that can take applications from the past, and fine-tuning it” in an age of AI.
“This isn’t a product release — it’s a milestone in the evolution of computing,” VAST Data CEO Renen Hallak said in a statement announcing the news. “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 VAST AI Operating System contains every aspect of a distributed system to run AI at a global scale: a kernel to run platform services on everything 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.
The company also unveiled AgentEngine, 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 Model Context Protocol-compatible tools. In addition, AgentEngine introduced massively-scalable agentic workflow observability.
“We are moving from the application era, where we used tens of apps, to agents, where there will be millions,” Denworth said. “We are at the dawn of the most impactful point in computer history. If we can make this all simpler, that is our goal.”
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.
Some personal assistants will be tailored to industry-specific cases, while others will be designed for general purpose. Examples include a reasoning chatbot; 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; and a life sciences researcher to assist with bioinformatic discovery.
VAST supports more than 1 million GPUs worldwide. Tens of billions of dollars of largely NVIDIA infrastructure runs on VAST. On Monday, VAST Data announced integration of the VAST Data Platform with NVIDIA AI-Q to deliver a unified foundation for building, accelerating, and scaling AI agents across enterprise environments.
