Cloudera, the only company bringing AI to data anywhere, today announced a strategic partnership with VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, to deliver a unified AI Factory, a scalable production environment where data is continuously ingested, refined, governed, and delivered to AI models for training and inference.
This infrastructure is available for enterprises operating across on-premises environments and public clouds, enabling a consistent AI operating model while allowing organizations to deploy AI services wherever performance, compliance and cost requirements are best met.
The collaboration integrates Cloudera’s next-generation containerized data services with the VAST AI Operating System – which unifies high-performance storage, database, and global namespace capabilities to power large-scale AI, analytics, and mission-critical data workloads. This data-platform layer integrates with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, turning latent enterprise data into AI-ready data that fuels the AI factory.
As organizations race to deploy generative and agentic AI, many are discovering that traditional architectures were not designed to support continuous AI pipelines spanning data preparation, training, inference, and analytics. One consequence is GPU starvation, where expensive accelerator clusters sit idle waiting for data. The joint solution addresses this challenge by ensuring data can move efficiently through the AI lifecycle while keeping GPUs continuously fed with high-throughput, low-latency data, dramatically improving utilization, performance, and return on investment.
Building the Enterprise AI Factory
Cloudera’s lakehouse architecture provides portable, containerized data services, including data engineering, streaming, analytics, machine learning, and AI, all deployable consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything architecture serves as the foundation of the VAST AI Operating System, delivering exabyte-scale data infrastructure, integrating vector database services with NVIDIA cuVS for GPU-accelerated vector indexing and search, and high-performance storage optimized for modern GPU clusters and AI workloads. Together, VAST’s enterprise storage, integrating the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, with NVIDIA-accelerated computing, transforms latent enterprise data into activated AI-ready data, while Cloudera delivers data engineering, analytics, governance, and AI services on top.
Together, the companies deliver:
- A unified AI Factory architecture from raw data ingestion to model deployment
- Consistent operations anywhere across data centers, private cloud, and public cloud
- Elimination of GPU starvation through ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency data pipelines
- Significantly improved compute efficiency by ensuring GPUs operate at sustained utilization levels
- Superior storage performance at scale for structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets
- Secure private AI environments with enterprise governance and compliance
This architecture enables organizations to move from isolated AI experiments to production-grade AI systems that continuously transform enterprise data into actionable intelligence for training, inference, analytics, and agentic applications.
This partnership also furthers solutions that create private AI Factories by combining NVIDIA AI infrastructure, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the VAST AI OS as the foundational data platform, built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design , and enterprise data and AI services from Cloudera into an optimized solution for private and sovereign AI. The Cloudera AI Inference Service, as one of the solutions, accelerated by NVIDIA NIM microservices, enables organizations to bring AI to their data where they can deploy and scale any model, including the latest NVIDIA Nemotron open models.
Customers will be able to accelerate Apache Spark workloads with NVIDIA cuDF to transparently accelerate Cloudera Data Engineering workloads by allowing Spark jobs to leverage VAST’s high-throughput data services via GPU-accelerated processing, supporting even more AI workload optimization.
For large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries,this represents a full “silicon-to-application” solution for building production-grade AI systems, anywhere.
Driving Significant Mutual Growth
The partnership combines 60 exabytes worth of customer-managed data, unlocking substantial new opportunities for both companies and their customers. This is coupled with an increasing enterprise demand for private AI infrastructure, creating a significant pipeline and future revenue growth opportunities.
“Enterprises are investing billions in GPUs, yet many struggle to achieve full utilization due to data bottlenecks,” said Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer & GM, Applied AI at Cloudera. “Our partnership with VAST eliminates GPU starvation and enables customers to build true AI Factories—where data flows seamlessly from ingestion to insight.”
“Most enterprises already have the data they need for AI. The challenge is unlocking the value in data to create a continuous pipeline of AI inference, fine-tuning, and data analysis to build the next generation of intelligent applications,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Together, Cloudera and VAST are helping customers build AI factories that connect data, intelligence, and infrastructure into a single operational platform for AI across hybrid environments.”
As Australian financial institutions continue investing in AI to support fraud detection, risk management, regulatory compliance, and customer experience initiatives, many are discovering that their existing data architectures aren’t designed for the demands of AI in production.
Keir Garrett, Managing Director of Cloudera Australia and New Zealand, elaborates, “A lot of Australian financial organisations are racing ahead with AI pilots, but the reality is they’re still held back by messy, fragmented data and weak governance. The real challenge isn’t the models; it’s building a trusted data foundation that’s controlled, compliant, and scalable enough for production. That’s where partnerships like Cloudera and VAST Data become critical in helping enterprises unify and govern data while maintaining the performance and sovereignty they need to turn AI from experiments into real business outcomes and achieve tangible results.”
The joint Cloudera–VAST AI Factory solution, built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, is available immediately through both companies’ enterprise sales teams and partner ecosystems. Reference architectures, validated deployment patterns, and industry-specific solutions will continue to expand throughout 2026.