Sharon AI deploys 600PB VAST platform to scale sovereign AI cloud

Australian neocloud Sharon AI has expanded its partnership with VAST Data, committing to deploy 600 petabytes of VAST’s AI Operating System as the foundational data layer for its sovereign AI cloud infrastructure.

Sharon AI said the deployment will serve government, enterprise, research and AI-native customers across Australia and Asia-Pacific, and positioned it as one of the largest sovereign AI data foundations in the region.

The companies put the scale in GPU terms: using a benchmark of roughly 6PBs of optimised AI storage per 1,000 GPUs for demanding workloads, they said the 600PB deployment provides a data backbone equivalent to supporting the needs of about 100,000 GPUs - a measure of data capacity rather than a count of GPUs Sharon AI operates.

Sharon AI said the platform lets it scale GPU capacity without running into data bottlenecks while meeting the governance and performance requirements sovereign customers demand, through capabilities including native multi-tenancy with per-customer isolation and service-level guarantees, built-in resilience, and data services such as KV cache optimisation and observability.

Underpinning it is VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture, which uses a single global namespace so processors can reach all data without copying or moving petabytes between systems, alongside multi-tenancy features aimed at cloud providers serving multiple sovereign tenants on shared infrastructure.

“Our customers refuse to choose between keeping their data sovereign and running AI at full speed - they need both at the highest level,” said James Manning, co-founder and chief executive of Sharon AI.

“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. This is how we build Australia’s AI future – powerful, secure, and proudly local.”

"Every breakthrough Sharon AI enables – in research, medicine, industry, or national capability – runs on data, and it only moves as fast and safely as the foundation beneath it,” said Renen Hallak, founder and chief executive of VAST Data.

“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. The VAST AI OS turns massive data estates into real-time intelligence assets, all while respecting sovereign boundaries. This is the future of AI infrastructure.”