Cloudera and VAST Data Collaborate to Create a Unified ‘AI Factory’

Cloudera, bringing AI to data, is collaborating 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.

According to the companies, 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, based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, turns latent enterprise data into AI-ready data that fuels the AI factory, the vendors said.

The joint solution ensures 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.

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, Cloudera said. 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, VAST said.

Together, VAST’s AI OS leveraging 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, said the vendors.

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 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.

“Enterprises are investing billions in GPUs, yet many struggle to achieve full utilization due to data bottlenecks,” said Abhas Ricky, chief business officer and 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.”

The joint Cloudera–VAST AI factory solution 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.

For more information about this news, visit www.cloudera.com or www.vastdata.com.