Remote-First Company | SEOUL, South Korea – October 13, 2026 – VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced that Hyundai Motor Company and Kia (HKMC) have made a strategic investment in VAST Data. The investment deepens a relationship that already includes development of HKMC's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and robotics AI capabilities on the VAST AI Operating System (VAST AI OS).
HKMC is not new to VAST. 42dot, HKMC’s autonomous mobility division and global software center, has been running ADAS research and autonomous driving workloads on the VAST AI OS platform in production. Before standardizing on VAST, HKMC’s ADAS and large language model programs sat on disparate platforms from different vendors, fragmenting data and duplicating effort as both programs scaled. 42dot consolidated these into a NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD powered by NVIDIA Hopper built on VAST, bringing ADAS and LLM development onto one data platform. As 42dot standardizes its AI data structure and builds a Data Flywheel system, VAST accelerates model training and deployment processes.
That consolidation is what the investment is built on. In production, the environment has delivered a 2:1 data reduction rate against real sensor and video data, along with the footprint and power efficiency that let 42dot expand capacity inside existing data center constraints. VAST's multiprotocol support, including S3 and NFS, lets simulation, training, and validation pipelines work against the same namespace without copies, and the platform replicates 42dot's AI datasets across its data center sites. HKMC has evaluated VAST the way a customer does, under load, over years, before evaluating it as an investor.
Autonomous vehicle software is now one of the most data-intensive workloads in enterprise AI. A single sensor-equipped test vehicle generates terabytes of data per day across cameras, LiDAR, radar, and ultrasonics. Multiplied across a global fleet, that becomes hundreds of petabytes under management. In addition, raw sensor data, randomized video clips, validation workloads, model update syncs, and real-time telematics each demand different throughput, latency, and governance characteristics from the same underlying platform. VAST's Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture is designed specifically to keep GPU fleets fed at that scale, without the data fragmentation and I/O bottlenecks in legacy HPC file systems.
Our journey with VAST started as a customer,” said Executive Vice President Hokeun Chung of HKMC’s Future Strategy Division. “Consolidating our ADAS and language model development onto one platform changed how quickly our teams can move from data collection to a validated model. Our work in autonomous driving and robotics depends on being able to use the data our vehicles generate quickly and reliably, and as data volumes grow it requires infrastructure that can keep pace. This investment reflects our confidence, earned in production, that VAST is the right long-term partner for that scale.
“The companies building physical AI such as vehicles, robots and machines, are running into the same data problem enterprises hit years ago, and at a much larger scale. We remain committed to breaking decades-old tradeoffs to deliver the data infrastructure stack for AI. HKMC’s decision to invest in VAST, having already seen the benefits of our technology, shows that our infrastructure is core to their future and capable of meeting the increasing needs of AI”, said Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data. VAST Data closed its Series F financing at a $30 billion valuation in April 2026, with participation from investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company, NEA, and NVIDIA. HKMC's investment adds to a growing base of strategic and financial investors backing VAST's position as the data foundation for AI infrastructure.
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