Nvidia backs Vast Data at $30B valuation
- Nvidia participated in a financing round that valued Vast Data at about $30 billion. - Investors pitched Vast as part of a new class of infrastructure firms needed for fast, large-scale AI workloads. - The investment signals that storage, data movement and software layers are now core to AI infrastructure bets, not just chips (cnbc.com).
Nvidia joined a $1 billion financing for Vast Data that valued the New York company at $30 billion. (cnbc.com) Vast said the Series F closed on April 22, 2026, with Drive Capital leading and Access Industries as co-lead. Fidelity Management and Research Company, New Enterprise Associates and Nvidia also participated. (vastdata.com) The round included both new money for the company and secondary sales that let some employees and early investors sell shares. Vast’s valuation was $9.1 billion in late 2023, so the new price is more than triple that mark. (reuters.com) Vast sells the data layer that sits next to artificial intelligence chips: software and storage systems that keep huge datasets close enough to graphics processors to train models and answer prompts quickly. CNBC reported investors pitched the company as part of a newer class of AI infrastructure firms built around storage, data movement and software, not only semiconductors. (cnbc.com) That pitch reflects a bottleneck in large AI systems. Faster chips do not help much if data arrives late, so cloud providers and model builders are spending on the plumbing that feeds graphics processing units, or GPUs, at scale. (bloomberg.com) Vast said it has more than $4 billion in cumulative bookings and more than $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue. The company said its customers include CoreWeave, xAI, ServiceNow, Pixar, the U.S. Air Force and several unnamed cloud providers. (vastdata.com) The company was founded in 2016 by Renen Hallak, Jeff Denworth and Shachar Fienblit, and it has marketed its platform as an “AI Operating System.” Reuters described Vast as a company that makes software for storing data used in artificial intelligence tasks. (vastdata.com) (reuters.com) Nvidia’s check also fits a broader pattern. The chipmaker has backed other AI infrastructure companies, including CoreWeave, as it expands beyond selling processors into the networks, servers and software stacks that surround them. (cnbc.com) For Vast, the new funding gives it more cash and a market test of how investors value the less visible parts of the AI buildout. For Nvidia, it is another bet that the companies moving and storing data can become as central to AI spending as the companies making the chips. (cnbc.com)
