SharonAI Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:SHAZ) announced an expanded collaboration with VAST Data that will see the VAST AI Operating System deployed at 600 petabytes across Sharon AI’s cloud infrastructure, and the company's shares rose 6.7% on Monday following the news.
The storage deployment is intended to serve as the core data layer for Sharon AI’s sovereign AI infrastructure, supporting a range of customers - government, enterprise, research, and AI-native organizations - throughout Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The partners framed the rollout as a major step in providing an onshore, high-performance data foundation for sensitive and strategic workloads.
VAST and Sharon AI quantified the 600PB build as equivalent to the data backbone needed for roughly 100,000 GPUs, using a benchmark of 6PB of optimized AI storage per 1,000 GPUs for large-scale workloads. The firms characterized the implementation as one of the largest sovereign AI data foundations in the Asia-Pacific market.
The VAST AI Operating System is built around a DASE architecture intended to remove traditional storage performance bottlenecks by operating as a parallel distributed system. Key platform features noted by the partners include a single global namespace that allows processors to access data without copying or moving petabytes, and integrated multi-tenancy that provides isolation, performance service-level agreements, and separate controls for each customer.
"Our customers refuse to choose between keeping their data sovereign and running AI at full speed - they need both at the highest level," James Manning, Co-Founder and CEO of Sharon AI, said in a company statement. "Standardizing 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."
The announcement emphasizes the partnership’s role in enabling Australia’s development of independent, high-performance AI capability while retaining sensitive workloads and strategic data onshore. The companies said they will continue engineering collaboration as Sharon AI’s customer workloads expand.
Key points
- The 600PB VAST deployment will form the primary data layer for Sharon AI’s sovereign AI infrastructure across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.
- The partners estimate the storage is equivalent to supporting about 100,000 GPUs, based on a benchmark of 6PB per 1,000 GPUs.
- Features of the VAST AI Operating System highlighted include a single global namespace and built-in multi-tenancy with performance SLAs and isolated controls.
Risks and uncertainties
- The companies note they will need to continue engineering collaboration as Sharon AI’s customer workloads scale - ongoing technical coordination is therefore an explicit dependency.
- The announcement underlines customer demand for both sovereignty and high AI performance; meeting both requirements at scale is presented as a core challenge the deployment seeks to address.
- The effectiveness of the 600PB deployment to serve the targeted workloads depends on the claimed benchmark equivalencies and operational delivery at this scale.