Cloudera has announced a strategic partnership with VAST Data to deliver a unified AI factory that enables enterprises to build, deploy, and scale AI workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The collaboration combines Cloudera's containerized data services with the VAST AI Operating System to create an integrated platform that streamlines AI data pipelines, improves GPU utilization, and supports production-grade AI deployments.
Quick Intel
Cloudera and VAST Data Build an Enterprise AI Factory
The partnership brings together Cloudera's hybrid lakehouse platform and VAST Data's AI Operating System to provide enterprises with a unified AI infrastructure. The solution enables organizations to continuously ingest, prepare, govern, and deliver AI-ready data for model training, inference, analytics, and agentic AI applications.
Built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, the combined platform integrates high-performance storage, database services, data engineering, machine learning, and AI capabilities into a consistent operating model that supports deployment across data centers, private clouds, and public clouds.
Reducing GPU Starvation for AI Workloads
As enterprises increase investments in generative AI and agentic AI, inefficient data movement has become a major challenge, often leaving expensive GPU resources underutilized while waiting for data.
The joint AI factory addresses this issue through ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency data pipelines that continuously feed AI workloads. This approach helps maximize GPU utilization, improve compute efficiency, and increase return on AI infrastructure investments while supporting structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets.
The unified platform also provides enterprise-grade governance, compliance, and secure private AI environments for organizations operating in highly regulated industries.
NVIDIA-Powered AI Infrastructure Enhances Performance
The collaboration extends private AI capabilities by combining NVIDIA AI infrastructure, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the VAST AI Operating System, and Cloudera's enterprise AI services.
The Cloudera AI Inference Service, accelerated by NVIDIA NIM microservices, enables organizations to deploy and scale AI models, including NVIDIA Nemotron open models, close to enterprise data.
Additionally, Apache Spark workloads can be accelerated using NVIDIA cuDF, allowing Cloudera Data Engineering workloads to leverage GPU-accelerated processing alongside VAST's high-throughput data platform for improved AI workload performance.
Supporting Hybrid AI and Future Enterprise Growth
According to the companies, the partnership combines access to approximately 60 exabytes of customer-managed data, creating opportunities to help enterprises transition from isolated AI projects to scalable production AI systems.
The solution enables organizations to transform enterprise data into AI-ready assets while maintaining operational consistency across hybrid infrastructure environments.
“Enterprises are investing billions in GPUs, yet many struggle to achieve full utilization due to data bottlenecks,” said Abhas Ricky, Chief Business Officer & GM, Applied AI at Cloudera. “Our partnership with VAST eliminates GPU starvation and enables customers to build true AI factories—where data flows seamlessly from ingestion to insight.”
“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 to build the next generation of intelligent applications,” 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 Cloudera–VAST AI factory solution is available immediately through both companies' enterprise sales teams and partner ecosystems, with additional reference architectures and industry-specific solutions planned throughout 2026.
About Cloudera
Cloudera is the only hybrid data and AI platform company that large organizations trust to bring AI to their data anywhere it lives. Unlike other providers, Cloudera delivers a consistent cloud experience that converges public clouds, on-prem data centers, and the edge, leveraging a proven open-source foundation. As the pioneer in big data, Cloudera empowers businesses to apply AI and assert control over 100% of their data, in all forms, improving security, governance, and real-time and predictive insights. The world’s largest brands across all industries rely on Cloudera to transform decision-making and ultimately boost bottom lines, safeguard against threats, and save lives.
To learn more, visit Cloudera.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X. ©2026 Cloudera and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cloudera, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
About VAST Data
VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI. Learn more at vastdata.com and follow VAST Data on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.
