Cloud computing company Sharon AI partners with tech data firm VAST Data to deploy 600PB sovereign AI storage in Australia
2026-06-22 17:00
Favorite

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Australian cloud computing company Sharon AI will deploy 600PB of VAST Data's AI operating system in its cloud infrastructure, deepening its partnership with VAST Data. The initiative aims to provide sovereign AI services to government, enterprise, research institutions, and AI-native market customers in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, addressing increasingly stringent control requirements from regional buyers over sensitive data storage, processing, governance, and commercialization at scale.

Sharon AI expands sovereign AI collaboration with VAST in Asia-Pacific

The agreement provides a large-scale data layer for Sharon AI's AI cloud platform, encompassing storage architecture, data movement, tenant isolation, performance isolation, and the mechanisms required to ensure efficient operation of accelerator clusters. Currently, AI infrastructure buyers have overly focused on GPU counts over the past two years, but large-scale training or inference environments can suffer from slow data access, fragmented storage, poor customer isolation, or compliance restrictions on cross-border data flows. In regulated markets, failure modes are often not technical crashes but legal, operational, or procurement-related issues.

Sharon AI positions the 600PB VAST deployment as the sovereign data foundation for AI factories in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The company states that based on a benchmark of approximately 6PB of optimized AI storage per 1,000 GPUs for demanding large-scale workloads, this storage commitment equates to supporting the data needs of roughly 100,000 GPUs. For enterprise and public sector customers, the core value lies in control—enabling buyers who desire high-performance AI infrastructure while keeping sensitive workloads, intellectual property, and strategic data within domestic borders.

This reflects a broader industry shift: governments want domestic AI capabilities; enterprises seek computing power without sending regulated data to global infrastructure pools; research institutions need to meet grant compliance and data governance requirements; and AI-native companies aim to scale without building everything from scratch. VAST Data provides the underlying AI data platform through its DASE architecture, designed to reduce bottlenecks by allowing processors to access data via a single global namespace without large-scale replication or movement across separate systems. In AI factories, the economics of expensive GPU clusters heavily depend on utilization, as idle accelerators incur high costs. For multi-tenant cloud operators, ensuring that customer workloads do not compromise each other's performance or data boundaries is also critical. VAST states that the platform supports built-in multi-tenancy, performance service levels, isolation, and individual customer control.

Australia's AI infrastructure faces multiple challenges, including distance, regulation, energy constraints, and global technology dependencies. The collaboration between Sharon AI and VAST aims to bridge this gap, demonstrating that the market does not have to choose between sovereign control and high-performance infrastructure. For infrastructure buyers, the appeal lies in a localized platform supporting training, inference, and agentic AI workloads without transferring sensitive data overseas. For developers, ease of use of the platform services is paramount; for investors, this deployment signals that Sharon AI is transitioning from a new cloud positioning to substantive infrastructure-level construction. VAST gains a regional proof point, while Sharon AI acquires enterprise-grade storage capabilities, with both parties aligning themselves with sovereign AI demands.

However, sovereignty claims can become complex when hardware, software, support teams, financing, and customers span multiple jurisdictions. AI factory buyers will also focus on whether the data platform can sustain mixed workloads at scale, including training jobs, retrieval systems, inference pipelines, analytics, agentic workflows, research data, and regulated enterprise applications. Sharon AI CEO James Manning stated that customers are unwilling to choose between data sovereignty and AI performance. VAST CEO Renen Hallak described the partnership as transforming large-scale data assets into real-time intelligence while respecting sovereign boundaries. The next phase hinges on customer acquisition, utilization, workload diversity, energy availability, compliance audits, integration reliability, and whether the 600PB can evolve into productive infrastructure.

This article is compiled by Wedoany. All AI citations must indicate the source as "Wedoany". If there is any infringement or other issues, please notify us promptly, and we will modify or delete it accordingly. Email: news@wedoany.com