Remote-First-Company | NEW YORK CITY & Microsoft Ignite – November 18, 2025 – VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to power the next wave of agentic AI. Now available to Azure customers through the Microsoft Azure Native ISV Service, the VAST AI OS provides a simple way to deploy high-performance, scalable AI infrastructure in the cloud.
Enterprises can access VAST’s complete suite of data services in Azure, including unified storage, data cataloging, and database capabilities to support complex AI workflows. This integration enables organizations to manage data seamlessly across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, delivering the scale, intelligence, and automation required to accelerate AI innovation.
Through the Azure Native ISV Service, VAST and Microsoft have co-engineered a fully managed, Azure-integrated experience. The VAST AI Operating System runs natively within Azure’s control plane, enabling customers to deploy and operate it using the same tools, governance, security, and billing workflows as any Microsoft service. This deep integration delivers unified management, consistent performance, and Azure-grade reliability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
This collaboration with Microsoft reflects our shared vision for the future of AI infrastructure, where performance, scale, and simplicity converge to enable enterprises to transform their business with agentic AI,” said Jonsi Stefansson, GM of Cloud at VAST Data. “Becoming an Azure Native ISV Service represents a major milestone in that journey, allowing us to deliver the VAST AI Operating System as a first-class, fully managed service inside Azure. Customers can now unify their data and AI pipelines across environments with the same power, simplicity, and performance they expect from VAST, now with the reach, elasticity, and reliability of Microsoft’s global cloud.
Azure customers can take full advantage of the capabilities of the VAST AI OS including:
Built for Agentic AI: Leverage VAST InsightEngine and AgentEngine to run intelligent, data-driven workflows directly where data lives. InsightEngine delivers stateless, high-performance compute and database services that accelerate vector search, RAG pipelines, and data preparation. AgentEngine orchestrates autonomous agents operating on real-time data streams, enabling continuous AI reasoning across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Performance at Scale for Model Builders: Designed for the demands of model training and inference, VAST AI OS keeps Azure GPU and CPU clusters saturated with high-throughput data services, intelligent caching, and metadata-optimized I/O to ensure predictable performance from pilot to multi-region scale.
Seamless Hybrid AI Workflows: An exabyte-scale DataSpace creates a unified global namespace that eliminates data silos and enables effortless data mobility. Customers can instantly burst from on-premises to Azure for GPU-accelerated workloads without migration or reconfiguration.
Unified Data Access: VAST’s DataStore supports file (NFS, SMB), object (S3), and block protocols, while the VAST DataBase combines transactional performance with the query speed of a warehouse and the economics of a data lake, allowing diverse workloads to run on one platform without compromise.
Elastic, Cost-Efficient Architecture: VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) design enables independent scaling of compute and storage resources within Azure. Combined with built-in Similarity Reduction, the platform minimizes storage footprint and reduces cost for large-scale AI infrastructure.
Streamlined Procurement & Operations: Deploy the VAST AI Operating System quickly through the Azure Native ISV Service, aligning with existing governance, security, and billing workflows to simplify operations and accelerate time-to-value for AI platform teams.
As organizations expand their AI initiatives, they need infrastructure that offers performance, flexibility, and operational efficiency across both cloud and hybrid environments,” said Aung Oo, Vice President of Product Management for Azure Storage Microsoft. “Through the Azure Native ISV Service, VAST’s AI Operating System gives Azure customers a high-performance, scalable platform that seamlessly extends on-premises AI pipelines into Azure’s GPU-accelerated infrastructure. The largest AI model builders in the world rely on VAST for its scalability, breakthrough performance, and AI-native capabilities. This collaboration helps customers streamline operations, reduce costs, and accelerate time-to-insight for AI workloads of every size.
As Microsoft continues to invest in the future of AI infrastructure, including its own custom silicon initiatives, VAST is working closely with the Azure team to align on next-generation platform requirements. This collaboration positions VAST as a foundational element of Microsoft’s broader AI computing strategy, helping to unlock the full potential of emerging innovations in compute. Together, the companies aim to ensure that future AI systems, regardless of the processor or model architecture, are fueled by an AI operating system built for scale, performance, and simplicity.
Upcoming Joint Appearances
VAST and Microsoft will further showcase the strength of their collaboration at major industry events this fall. At Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco, Renen Hallak, VAST Data Founder and CEO, will join Aung Oo, Vice President of Product Management for Azure Storage, on {insert date, time and location} to discuss how Azure and the VAST AI Operating System are enabling enterprises to operationalize agentic AI at global scale.
At Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis, VAST Data Co-Founder Jeff Denworth will host Nidhi Chappell, Corporate Vice President of Azure AI and HPC Infrastructure, on November 19 in a conversation exploring how Azure AI and modern data strategies are shaping the AI cloud. Register here to join the breakfast session and be part of the discussion on the future of AI infrastructure. Representatives from both VAST and Microsoft will also deliver technical presentations and demos in their respective booths throughout the event. Learn more by visiting VAST Booth #3204 and Microsoft Booth #1627.