New York City based AI Operating System company VAST Data has expanded its collaboration with Santa Clara headquartered computing specialist AMD to help AI cloud providers and enterprises build and operate high-performance AI factories at scale.

The firm said the collaboration brought together its VAST AI Operating System with 6th Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs and AMD Instinct™ GPUs to support scalable training, inference and agentic AI workloads with improved efficiency, flexibility and performance.

“AI is entering an operational phase where infrastructure efficiency matters as much as model performance,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “The industry is discovering that inference is fundamentally a data problem. Success depends on how effectively organisations can bring data, compute, memory and intelligence together as a single system. The VAST AI Operating System was built for this transition, giving AI cloud providers and enterprises a more efficient, scalable and open foundation for training, inference and the next generation of agentic AI applications.”

“As organisations move beyond model training and begin operationalizing AI agents, reasoning systems and large-scale inference services, infrastructure requirements are rapidly changing,” it said. “Success is increasingly determined not only by compute performance, but by how efficiently organisations can manage data, memory, context and compute resources as a unified system.”

VAST Data said that this unified approach centered on VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) architecture, which extends beyond standard storage to deliver robust multi-tenancy support for secure workload isolation, native multi-protocol access, and a unified global namespace that simplifies data access across distributed environments.

“By streamlining critical data operations like rapid model loading alongside VAST’s core data platform values, the system allows AI clouds to run massive, concurrent workloads while maximising hardware utilisation,” the company said.

VAST Data and AMD are expanding their collaboration to provide an open and flexible approach to AI infrastructure that combines accelerated computing, intelligent data services and optimised inference software into a unified platform for AI clouds and enterprise AI deployments.

The collaboration includes:

• VAST has selected 6^th Gen AMD EPYC processors, formerly codenamed “Venice,” to power the 6^th-generation of CBox and 3rd-generation of EBox platforms to underpin the VAST AI OS. 6th Gen EPYC CPUs bring support for PCIe® Gen-6 that enables 2X the I/O bandwidth generationally for improved file and object storage performance, and helps improves CPU core performance by lowering latency for critical AI data services including database, data warehouse, and event streaming via VAST’s DataBase and DataEngine capabilities.
• An AI Infrastructure Reference Architecture developed by VAST, AMD and DriveNets that features AMD Helios rack-scale AI infrastructure coupled with the VAST AI OS and DriveNets AI Fabric networking. These reference architectures document infrastructure support for model training, inference, reinforcement learning (RL) and KV cache workloads with sizing considerations and guidance for AI cloud providers and enterprises to simplify and accelerate high performance, highly available and efficient AI factory deployments.
• Expanded ecosystem collaboration with software innovators including TensorMesh and EmbeddedLLM to accelerate deployment of production-ready inference architectures optimised for agentic AI applications.

• New KV cache and inference optimisations that combine AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD Infinity Context, and AMD ROCm™ software with the VAST AI OS. 
• Early VAST testing utilising an AMD Instinct MI355X GPU demonstrated 9X speedup in time-to-first-token (TTFT), and 9.7X more token throughput utilising VAST for KV Cache offloading with high concurrency agentic AI workloads. *
• These accelerated and high concurrency results are critical to deliver low latency, lower cost and energy efficient inference deployments

• Automated KV Cache Lifecycle Management: Purging cached data that contains sensitive or personal information is a critical enterprise compliance challenge. The integration leverages VAST’s native data lifecycle policies to automatically expire and delete KV cache data, helping ensure robust security, privacy, and regulatory compliance capabilities without manual operational overhead.
• The AMD Pensando™ Pollara 400 AI NIC provides the high-performance data path connecting AMD Instinct GPUs to the VAST AI OS. Using NFS over TCP and NFS over RDMA, this integration efficiently moves data from GPU memory to the NVMe SSD-based VAST storage cluster, enabling the KV-cache and storage access that large-scale inference and agentic AI workloads depend on.
• Proven deployments across leading AI cloud providers delivering AMD technology-powered AI services to customers around the world.