VAST Data Raises $1B at $30B Valuation with Nvidia Backing as AI Data Infrastructure Demand Accelerates
Summary: VAST Data raised $1 billion in a Series F round at a $30 billion valuation, more than tripling from its $9.1 billion Series E valuation in late 2023. Drive Capital and Access Industries co-led the round, with Nvidia, Fidelity Management and Research Company, and NEA participating. Over $500 million is secondary capital. The company boasts $4 billion in cumulative bookings, over $500 million in committed ARR, and positive free cash flow with revenue tripling year over year. Key customers include xAI’s 200,000-GPU Colossus cluster and CoreWeave’s $1.17 billion agreement.
VAST Data’s valuation is notable not only for raising a substantial amount in 2026, but also because it specializes in data infrastructure, a critical but often overlooked component of the AI stack. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, highlighted this significance at VAST’s Forward 2026 conference, stating that VAST Data transforms "the storage of AI infrastructure" and without their technology, even powerful AI processors face data bottlenecks.
What VAST Data Does:
VAST Data provides an AI operating system that integrates storage, database, and compute into a unified platform. This DASE (Disaggregated and Shared Everything) architecture prioritizes flash memory and single-tier storage, eliminating traditional storage hierarchies designed to manage limited data movement between fast and slow tiers. This design offers significant advantages for AI workloads requiring massive data processing at high throughputs.
The platform extends beyond storage with:
- VAST DataSpace: Globally distributed namespace scaling to exabytes and trillions of files, accessible across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations.
- VAST InsightEngine: Automation for real-time AI pipelines, handling tasks like chunking and embedding data efficiently.