Sydney-based neocloud specialist Sharon AI has inked an expanded strategic partnership with New York AI Operating System company VAST Data, under which Sharon AI will deploy 600 petabyte of the VAST AI operating system across its own AI cloud infrastructure.

Sharon AI said the deal made the VAST AI Operating System the foundational data layer for its sovereign AI infrastructure, targeting government, enterprise, research, and AI-native customers across Australia and Asia-Pacific.

“It positions Sharon AI at the forefront of Australia’s push to build independent, high-performance AI capability – keeping the nation’s most sensitive workloads, intellectual property, and strategic data onshore while delivering the raw power needed for next-generation training, inference, and agentic AI systems.”

“Sharon AI can now scale GPU capacity without data bottlenecks while meeting the governance and performance requirements sovereign customers demand,” the company said.

The company said the scalable data backbone – equivalent to supporting the data needs of ~100,000 GPUs – was a transformative leap that cemented Sharon AI’s AI Cloud platform as one of the most substantial sovereign AI clouds in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

“Our customers refuse to choose between keeping their data sovereign and running AI at full speed – they need both at the highest level,” said James Manning, Co-Founder and CEO of Sharon AI. “Standardising on the VAST AI Operating System at this unprecedented 600PB scale gives us exactly that: a rock-solid, high-performance foundation we can scale confidently as demand for sovereign AI across Australia and Asia-Pacific accelerates.”