VAST Data Launches AI Operating System

Today, VAST Data introduced its new VAST AI Operating System, designed to power the next era of AI.

As enterprises across the globe race toward agentic computing and organizations prepare to deploy intelligent agents at scale, VAST’s unified infrastructure approach promises to radically simplify and accelerate this transition.

The launch marks a defining moment for VAST and the broader computing landscape. With AI reshaping the fabric of business and society, VAST presents an operating system built from the ground up for reasoning machines. According to VAST, this vertically integrated software stack delivers a full runtime and orchestration platform, a federated data and compute cloud, and a low-code framework to bring AI agents to life.

From Data Platform to Operating System

The journey to today’s unveiling began in 2023, when VAST introduced its Data Platform to support the largest AI builders in the world. Customers deployed tens of exabytes of infrastructure to power training and inference pipelines, storing massive unstructured datasets in the VAST DataStore and rich metadata in the VAST DataBase. But as reasoning models matured and agentic workflows gained traction, VAST recognized the need to elevate its platform beyond traditional definitions.

Data platforms, VAST argues, were designed with batch computing in mind – ill-equipped for the real-time, data-intensive demands of modern AI. Legacy systems impose limitations on latency, scalability, and architecture, creating friction that slows progress. VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture, by contrast, eliminates these bottlenecks by enabling massive parallelism, global scale, and seamless access to all data in a single tier.

Introducing the VAST AgentEngine

At the heart of today’s announcement is the debut of the VAST AgentEngine – a low-code, AI agent deployment and orchestration runtime that completes the company’s vision for an AI Operating System. According to VAST, AgentEngine allows organizations to:

Define and deploy intelligent agents

Pair agents with reasoning models

Equip agents with tools for data, functions, and APIs

Observe and govern agentic workflows with rich telemetry

The system provides what's needed to run massively scaled, fault-tolerant AI pipelines, including scheduling, message queues, tool servers, and support for agents with multiple personas and security credentials. Most importantly, AgentEngine reportedly brings agents to life directly within the VAST DataEngine, allowing reasoning to occur where the data lives – without latency, silos, or complex integration layers.

A Full-Stack OS for AI

The VAST AI Operating System unifies six key components:

VAST DataSpace: A global namespace for federated compute and storage

VAST DataStore: High-performance storage for unstructured data

VAST DataBase: A real-time, scalable metadata and vector database

VAST DataEngine: A distributed compute engine for orchestrating workloads

VAST InsightEngine: A data refinery that uses AI to generate context and embeddings

VAST AgentEngine: The new AI runtime for intelligent agent orchestration

Together, these components form a cohesive platform designed for real-time data capture, contextualization, and action, making it possible to transition from passive data management to intelligent decision-making systems.

Utility Agents and Developer Enablement

To accelerate adoption, VAST plans to begin releasing a series of open-source utility agents – simple but powerful reference implementations designed to showcase the possibilities of agentic computing. These will include:  

A compliance agent to enforce policy and governance

A reasoning chatbot grounded in organizational data

An editor agent for rich media creation

A life sciences researcher for bioinformatics workflows

In addition, VAST Forward, a series of global developer workshops, will provide hands-on training in building on the platform.

The TechArena Take

With this launch, VAST further cements itself as foundational to the next computing era. The AI Operating System is built to democratize access to frontier AI capabilities and make agentic infrastructure a reality for enterprises of every size.

In the words of VAST CEO Renen Hallak, this isn’t just a product launch – it’s the beginning of a new paradigm. And with a clean-sheet architecture, a unified software stack, and support for over a million GPUs already deployed globally, VAST is poised as a leader in the era of the Thinking Machine.