Brisbane-based automated connectivity specialist Megaport has joined forces with New York-headquartered AI Operating System firm VAST Data, allowing the Bevan Slattery founded firm to extend into delivering integrated compute and GPU services following its acquisition of Latitude.sh, a Sao Paulo-based cloud enabling company.

Under the agreement, VAST will bring the enterprise-grade data services to Megaport’s network fabric, enabling customers to deploy and scale AI workloads across distributed, hybrid and multi cloud environments.

Megaport said that as enterprises move AI into production, workloads were no longer confined to a single cloud, data centre or region. “AI and data pipelines must reach wherever compute is available and wherever governance requires workloads to run, but the underlying infrastructure is often still fragmented, with network, compute and data services managed as separate layers,” it added.

Megaport and VAST will combine Megaport’s private, programmable connectivity across more than 1,100 data centres and Latitude.sh’s automated bare-metal compute and GPU services, with the unified enterprise data services from the VAST AI OS.

“Enterprises are no longer thinking about networking, compute and data as separate decisions,” said Michael van Rooyen, Executive Vice President, Global Innovation at Megaport. “They want infrastructure that is automated, global and flexible enough to support what AI requires next. VAST gives us one software layer to support enterprise data services across both Megaport and Latitude.sh, allowing us to expand beyond connectivity into the services layer customers need to build and scale modern AI workloads, with fewer operational silos and a faster path from distributed infrastructure to production AI.”

“AI does not scale on infrastructure that is powerful in pieces but fragmented in practice,” said Phil Manez, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at VAST Data. “The next era will be built on global fabrics that connect data, compute and services wherever customers need them. Megaport has built one of the most important connectivity platforms in the world, and with the VAST AI Operating System, that platform can become a data-aware foundation for production AI, helping infrastructure, compute and governed data operate together.”