Cloudera and VAST Data partner to deliver AI factory platform across hybrid environments

Cloudera and VAST Data have announced a strategic partnership to deliver a joint AI factory platform, combining Cloudera's containerised data services with the VAST AI Operating System to support continuous AI pipelines across on-premises and public cloud environments.

The joint solution is designed to ensure high-throughput, low-latency data flows continuously through the AI lifecycle - from ingestion and preparation through to training, inference and analytics - keeping GPUs at sustained utilisation.

Cloudera brings its lakehouse architecture and portable, containerised data services, covering data engineering, streaming, analytics, machine learning and AI, deployable consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

VAST contributes its Disaggregated Shared Everything architecture, which unifies high-performance storage, a vector database service integrated with NVIDIA cuVS for GPU-accelerated indexing and search, and a global namespace capable of exabyte-scale data management.

The combined platform is based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design and incorporates NVIDIA NIM microservices to accelerate Cloudera's AI Inference Service. The two companies said customers will also be able to accelerate Apache Spark workloads using NVIDIA cuDF, allowing Spark jobs to use VAST's high-throughput data services via GPU-accelerated processing.

For channel partners, the joint solution is positioned as a full silicon-to-application offering for regulated industries requiring private or sovereign AI deployments - a segment both vendors said represents significant pipeline opportunity. The partnership combines 60 exabytes of customer-managed data across both companies' bases, according to the vendors.

“A lot of Australian organisations are racing ahead with AI pilots, but the reality is they’re still held back by messy, fragmented data and weak governance. The real challenge isn’t the models; it’s building a trusted data foundation that’s controlled, compliant, and scalable enough for production," Keir Garrett, MD for Cloudera Australia and New Zealand, said.

"That’s where partnerships like Cloudera and VAST Data become critical in helping enterprises unify and govern data while maintaining the performance and sovereignty they need to turn AI from experiments into real business outcomes and achieve tangible results.”

"Most enterprises already have the data they need for AI. The challenge is unlocking the value in data to create a continuous pipeline of AI inference, fine-tuning, and data analysis," said Jeff Denworth, co-founder at VAST Data.

"Together, Cloudera and VAST are helping customers build AI factories that connect data, intelligence, and infrastructure into a single operational platform for AI across hybrid environments."

The joint solution is available immediately through both companies' enterprise sales teams and partner ecosystems. Reference architectures, validated deployment patterns and industry-specific solutions are expected to expand throughout 2026.