Australian neocloud provider Sharon AI has signed an agreement with data infrastructure company VAST Data to deploy 600 petabytes of VAST’s AI Operating System across Sharon AI’s sovereign cloud.
The companies said the deployment is intended to provide a foundational data layer for Sharon AI customers across government, enterprise and research, and could support the data needs of up to 100,000 GPUs based on a benchmark of roughly 6PB of optimised AI storage per 1,000 GPUs.
The announcement follows a six-year compute collaboration Sharon AI previously disclosed with NVIDIA, and comes as the company foreshadows an ASX listing later this year.
Sharon AI CEO and co-founder James Manning said the agreement was aimed at customers seeking both data sovereignty and performance. “Standardising on the VAST AI Operating System at this unprecedented 600PB scale gives us exactly that: a rock-solid, high-performance foundation we can scale confidently as demand for sovereign AI across Australia and Asia-Pacific accelerates,” Manning said.
VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak said the company would act as the data foundation for Sharon AI’s sovereign cloud. “As the data foundation for Sharon AI’s sovereign cloud, we are proud to partner with them to support Australia’s hardest and most strategic AI ambitions,” Hallak said.
According to the companies, the deployment is expected to deliver native multi-tenancy, isolation between customers, resilience features and integrated services such as observability and key-value cache optimisation, targeting high-throughput training and inference workloads.
While the companies described the agreement as one of the largest sovereign AI data foundation deployments in the region, details such as contract value, deployment timeframe, and the specific facilities involved were not disclosed.
