Nvidia backs Vast Data
- Nvidia invested in Vast Data, which the report values at about $30 billion. - CNBC covered the funding as part of Nvidia's pattern of investing in AI‑related data infrastructure firms. - The deal underscores that storage, retrieval and data movement are becoming first‑class bottlenecks for AI systems (cnbc.com).
Nvidia has invested in Vast Data as part of a new $1 billion funding round that values the company at $30 billion. (cnbc.com) Vast Data said on April 22 that Drive Capital led the Series F round, Access Industries co-led it, and Fidelity Management & Research, NEA and Nvidia also participated. The company said the financing included both new money and secondary share sales, bringing the total transaction value to about $1 billion. (vastdata.com) The new valuation is more than three times Vast’s $9.1 billion Series E valuation in late 2023. Reuters reported the jump reflects investor demand for companies building the infrastructure used to train and run artificial intelligence systems. (vastdata.com) (reuters.com) Vast sells the software layer that stores, organizes and serves data to AI systems, a job that sits between expensive Nvidia chips and the datasets those chips need to keep working. CNBC said Nvidia has increasingly put money into companies around that stack, not just into chip design itself. (cnbc.com) That focus has widened as AI builders run into a different problem from raw chip supply: moving huge volumes of data fast enough for training and inference. Vast said its platform is used to “store, contextualize, and act on data” in environments that power millions of graphics processing units, or GPUs. (vastdata.com) Vast has been moving beyond storage into what it calls an “AI operating system” that combines data services, databases and compute orchestration in one platform. In a February announcement with Nvidia, the company said its software now runs directly on Nvidia-powered servers for retrieval, analytics, vector search and inference workloads. (vastdata.com) The company has already tied itself to some of the biggest buyers of AI infrastructure. In November 2025, Vast said it signed a $1.17 billion commercial agreement with CoreWeave to serve as the primary data foundation for CoreWeave’s AI cloud. (vastdata.com) Vast was founded in 2016, and its latest funding shows how investors are assigning chip-era valuations to companies handling the data traffic around those chips. Nvidia’s check puts it deeper into that layer of the market as customers build larger AI clusters and try to keep them fed with data. (vastdata.com) (cnbc.com)
