Businesses rushing to implement artificial intelligence are unfortunately running into fragmentation across storage, data management and compute. It’s a dilemma that Vast Data Inc. is eager to correct, using its proprietary AI Operating System platform.

Following a decade of engineering around first-principles distributed computing, Vast is using its tenth anniversary to hail the movement of AI-native infrastructure from experimental to foundational. At the center of that transformation, AI itself is the catalyst driving a fundamental rethink of the data and compute stack, according to Jeff Denworth (pictured), co-founder of Vast.

“We’re on a march not just to reinvent how people store and access their data, but basically to reinvent the entire data processing stack,” Denworth said. “That involves us thinking about … competing with the entire data industry, the entire compute industry and the entire storage industry — all with a single software product that we think kind of defies conventional limits, where customers just get gravitated to the gains that they get.”

Denworth spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight at Vast Forward 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the economics of AI infrastructure, expansions to the company’s AI Operating System platform and Vast’s path to profitability. (* Disclosure below.)

Vast bets the AI Operating System can reshape modern infrastructure

The core of Vast’s ambitious pitch is the bundling of normally separate tech layers — storage, a global file system, a global index and GPU-aware scheduler, into a single, coherent platform, according to Denworth. This approach allows customers to treat their infrastructure as an AI-ready fabric instead of a jumble of solutions, he added.

“You’ve got this global compute scheduler on top of this global file system with a global index. And we build — when we’re allowed to — all the way down to the device driver level so that we can get the maximum efficiency out of hardware,” Denworth explained. “At that point, we ran out of ideas. We didn’t know what else to call it. So we just called it the AI Operating System.”

Vast’s strategy seems to be resonating with early AI leaders, with the company now reporting more than half a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue and several billion in deferred revenue, along with sustained positive cash flow, Denworth noted. But profitability is only one aspect of its long-term vision, as expanded partnerships with giants such as Nvidia Corp. point to ambitions that extend far beyond financial performance.

“We want to be like the Windows for AI. You just put your apps on it — it works,” he said. “Everybody in the world, whether it’s a cloud platform or a server that you’ve deployed or some edge robot, it’s just Vast running everywhere.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Vast Forward 2026:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner for Vast Forward. Sponsors of theCUBE’s coverage, including presenting sponsor Solidigm, do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE