New Confidential AI runtime within the VAST AI Operating System allows leading models from Cohere, CrowdStrike, Deepgram, Factory, Fundamental, NVIDIA, TwelveLabs and others to securely run against sensitive enterprise data while protecting customer and model IP
SINGAPORE – 23 September 2026 – VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced VAST DataEnclave, the confidential AI capability of the VAST DataEngine, built on NVIDIA Confidential Computing, with the support of ecosystem partners including top AI model builders, AI clouds, AI security and leading AI hardware providers. By enabling deployment inside customer data centres or trusted cloud hardware, including environments where leading AI models could not previously operate, VAST Data, in collaboration with NVIDIA and partners, is bringing proprietary and open AI models across a range of modalities to the world’s most sensitive data – while giving customers control over cost, performance, model selection and data privacy, and giving model builders reach into environments they could never serve before.
Across financial services, healthcare, government and other highly regulated industries, some of the world’s most valuable data remains inside tightly controlled environments where moving it to an external AI service is impractical or prohibited. That creates a fundamental challenge for AI: sensitive data often cannot move to where leading models run, while model builders cannot distribute proprietary models into infrastructure they do not trust.
VAST DataEnclave extends the VAST AI Operating System to resolve this impasse with a hardware-isolated secure runtime and cryptographic attestation that verifies the environment and its enforced policy before sensitive assets, such as proprietary models and sensitive data, are decrypted and loaded into the secure enclave container for analysis, where they remain protected in CPU and GPU memory during processing. Customer data keys remain under customer control, model keys and weights remain within the model builder’s trust domain, and infrastructure operators and administrators cannot access either while they are being processed.
Looking ahead, today’s announcement expands the range of advanced models organisations can deploy within their own environments, while advancing VAST's broader AI Operating System vision, in which models are managed as a logical resource alongside data rather than as applications that simply sit on top of the infrastructure. As organisations adopt ecosystems of specialised models, each fit for a different purpose, priced differently and subject to different levels of trust, the AI OS will increasingly need to pair the right model with the right task and govern those models across environments: determining where they run, what data they can access, who or what can use them and the policies under which they operate. As organisations increasingly fine-tune their own models and agents generate specialised intelligence from their interactions, model weights become a new class of enterprise intellectual property, making secure management at scale an increasingly important function of the operating system.
“Models are becoming a resource the operating system has to manage, the same way it manages data,” said Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO, VAST Data. “That means knowing which model fits which task, what it can see, who can use it and under what rules, and doing all of that inside the same security and operational boundaries an enterprise applies to everything else. Bringing leading AI models securely to the world's most sensitive data is where this starts. Where it leads is a world where every organisation is managing an ecosystem of fine-tuned models that represent its true intellectual property. The VAST AI Operating System is what keeps them secure, governed and useful.”
“As a trusted AI infrastructure provider, Sharon AI exists to make secure, scalable and sovereign AI compute available to every organisation that needs it,” said James Manning, CEO and Co-founder, Sharon AI. “Our customers across Australia and Asia-Pacific need to run AI at full speed without compromising on data sovereignty, and increasingly they also want access to frontier models that were previously only available offshore. Building on our sovereign data foundation with VAST, DataEnclave lets us host those models onshore, inside attested environments where the model owner’s weights and the customer’s data are both protected from everyone, including us. That gives our customers the flexibility to operate on their own terms, backed by sovereignty they can demonstrate, not just declare.”
Conventional encryption protects model weights while they are stored and while they move across the network. Confidential computing extends encryption and protects data during execution. NVIDIA Confidential Computing, now in its third generation on Hopper, Blackwell, and Rubin platforms, ensures that sensitive data and models are only released during execution after the workload is verified and a secure enclave has been established. VAST DataEnclave uses NVIDIA Confidential Computing to create a secure container runtime and attestation service directly within the VAST DataEngine. Proprietary models execute inside secure enclaves established through CPU and GPU trusted execution environments.
Key capabilities include:
- Hardware-Isolated Execution: Protects workloads inside confidential virtual machines and containers, using NVIDIA Confidential Computing to encrypt guest memory, GPU memory and NVLink traffic while isolating active data and models from infrastructure operators, administrators and other tenants sharing the same hardware.
- Verify-Before-Decrypt Attestation: Cryptographically verifies the trusted execution environment – including NVIDIA GPU attestation – before releasing decryption keys, ensuring sensitive assets are accessible only to approved workloads running in a trusted environment.
- Independent Key Control: Enables enterprises and model builders to maintain their respective keys within their own trust domains through Bring Your Own Key Management System (KMS) integrations so each party controls and enforces policy on its own assets. This protects an enterprise’s own fine-tuned weights, which are fast becoming critical IP, as much as a model builder’s base weights.
- Connected or Air-Gapped Deployment: Supports connected or fully air-gapped environments with DataEnclave deployments using attestation services built on the open CNCF Trustee stack, or in partnership with Fortanix via its Confidential AI infrastructure for fully sovereign AI.
- Governed and Auditable by Design: Records attestation events, key releases and enclave lifecycle actions in a tamper-proof, queryable audit trail in the VAST DataBase, providing visibility into what ran, where and under what verified policy without exposing protected data or weights.
- Secure Agent Sandboxes: The same DataEngine secure runtime provides isolated execution environments for AI agents through VAST AgentEngine, enforcing policy over the data, systems and tools agents can access and the actions they can take. Unlike people, agents are not accountable for their actions, so they need identity, a contained runtime and observability into when, how and why they each took action, plus auditability if something went wrong.
“Model weights are fast becoming the most valuable intellectual property in the world. Base weights define the value of frontier models, while fine-tuned weights will increasingly represent the proprietary intelligence of AI-driven enterprises,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder, VAST Data. “As the stakes get higher, so does the need to secure enterprise data so customers can apply the most intelligent AI models against it. Today, VAST Data – in partnership with NVIDIA – is moving the industry forward with a comprehensive approach to verifying previously untrusted computing environments and unlocking the ability to run any model against any data, anywhere.”
VAST DataEnclave extends confidential execution across the infrastructure where AI models and sensitive data are processed, combining hardware isolation and verifiable attestation to protect both while they are in use.
“Enterprise data is essential to accurate, usable AI – and keeping business data confidential is critical to protecting IP in the age of agents. VAST Data’s integration of NVIDIA Confidential Computing delivers protection for both enterprises and model builders, providing security, identity, permissions, governance and compliance as a foundation of the agent architecture,” said Justin Boitano, Vice President Enterprise AI, NVIDIA.
An Ecosystem for {un}bounded AI
VAST is bringing together model builders, AI clouds, AI security, and infrastructure providers around a shared architecture for customer-controlled environments. Customers can now execute on their AI strategies without running into boundaries that previously cut off access to cloud-hosted models. At the same time, they can bring these newly available models within their own carefully constructed boundaries to manage cost, security, and other operational concerns.
VAST DataEnclave enables AI cloud providers worldwide to deliver attested, sovereign environments where model builders, enterprises, and governments retain control over their IP and data within their own jurisdictions. Because isolation is enforced in hardware, sovereign and regional AI clouds can establish verifiable trust without dedicating entire machines to a single tenant, and can offer the newest accelerated computing systems, such as NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure, from facilities operated within national borders.
This new VAST AI OS capability also provides OEMs the opportunity to deliver integrated confidential AI infrastructure that brings together trusted execution, accelerated computing and VAST-powered data infrastructure.
Additional supporting quotes:
- “Customers around the world have unique regulatory and sovereignty requirements, and they are asking for AI that is encrypted end-to-end – not just at rest but in motion and during inference. Cohere has prioritised confidential compute for some time, and by working with VAST we can now bring that same level of security and governance to any data centre, wherever customers choose to deploy. Together we are building a confidential compute strategy that gives customers more choice and more control, so they can run our models and the agents they build on North where their data already lives: their infrastructure, their jurisdiction, their rules.” Frank O’Dowd, Chief Revenue and Commercial Officer, Cohere
- “Video is where an enormous amount of institutional knowledge lives, and it is also the data that is hardest to move. Archives, sensor feeds and full-motion video sit in environments that are disconnected by design. TwelveLabs built our video intelligence models Marengo and Pegasus to run wherever that video already is, with no degradation in capability. With VAST DataEnclave, we can bring video intelligence into the most restricted environments while keeping our models protected and our customers’ footage entirely under their control.” Jae Lee, CEO & Co-founder, TwelveLabs
- “CrowdStrike SafeMind models are trained on the world’s largest pureplay cyber dataset, and that intelligence relies on the trust built around it. Defenders in regulated industries want to put these models to work against their most sensitive data, inside their own boundaries, while maintaining control of their data and protecting the models themselves. VAST’s attestation-based approach brings model weights and enterprise data together in a verified environment while keeping both protected and under their respective owners’ control. That’s what it takes to put frontier security models to work where the stakes are highest.” Dr Bartley Richardson, Chief AI and Autonomous Systems Officer, CrowdStrike
- “Bringing the most capable AI models to sensitive enterprise data requires trust across the entire infrastructure. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA brings together secure, validated compute, networking, security and data infrastructure so customers can put AI into production with greater confidence and control. With VAST DataEnclave, that foundation can extend to some of the most sensitive workloads and regulated environments, giving customers more freedom to use the models they want, where their data needs to remain.” Jeremy Foster, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Compute
- “Supermicro brings together the compute, storage, networking, cooling and infrastructure expertise required to make advanced AI practical at scale. Working with VAST and NVIDIA, we’re delivering pre-integrated, validated systems that combine NVIDIA Vera Rubin accelerated computing with confidential computing and the VAST AI Operating System. This enables enterprises to deploy frontier AI faster and with greater control over their data, models and infrastructure – even in sovereign and air-gapped environments.” Matthew Thauberger, Chief Revenue Officer, Supermicro
Availability
VAST DataEnclave is being previewed today and will ship in Q1 2027 through VAST Data and participating OEM partners, including Cisco and Supermicro.
Additional Resources:
- Un[bounded]: Confidential AI
- AI Operating System: VAST DataEnclave
- Blog: Introducing VAST DataEnclave: Confidential AI for Sensitive Data and Proprietary Models
- Whitepaper: VAST DataEnclave Architecture and Trust Model
- FAQ: VAST DataEnclave FAQ
- Videos:
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 organisations 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 trade-offs 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 https://x.com/VAST_dataX.
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