Sharon AI, VAST Data Scale APAC AI Factory Push

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SharonAI Holdings expands its sovereign AI cloud partnership with VAST Data, committing 600PB of storage capacity — the equivalent backbone for roughly 100,000 GPUs — across Australia and Asia-Pacific.

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What Happened

The expanded agreement designates the VAST AI Operating System as the foundational data layer for Sharon AI's sovereign AI stack, serving government agencies, enterprise customers, research institutions, and AI-native businesses across the Asia-Pacific. Using an industry benchmark of approximately 6PB of optimized AI storage per 1,000 GPUs for demanding large-scale workloads, the 600PB commitment translates to the scalable data infrastructure required to support roughly 100,000 GPUs — making it one of the most significant AI factory infrastructure deployments in the region by raw capacity.

James Manning, Co-Founder and CEO of Sharon AI, described the strategic rationale in unambiguous terms: "Our customers refuse to choose between keeping their data sovereign and running AI at full speed — they need both at the highest level. Standardizing 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."

Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data, framed the partnership in terms of enabling outcomes rather than raw infrastructure: "Every breakthrough Sharon AI enables — in research, medicine, industry, or national capability — runs on data, and it only moves as fast and safely as the foundation beneath it. The VAST AI OS turns massive data estates into real-time intelligence assets."

Strategic Context

The announcement is the latest in a series of moves that have rapidly transformed Sharon AI from an early-stage neocloud into a significant player in the Asia-Pacific tech sovereign AI ecosystem. In February 2026, the company completed its Nasdaq IPO. In the following months it secured a six-year strategic compute collaboration with NVIDIA, co-launched Australia's first Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA and Cisco, and closed a $50 million five-year cloud computing infrastructure agreement with NEXTDC — in which VAST Data also played a role.

Sharon AI has also disclosed cumulative AI services contract commitments totalling more than $2.2 billion, including a $1.26 billion ESDS contract and a $950 million cloud services agreement with an unnamed global technology company. Revenue recognition on these contracts is expected to begin in the second half of 2026 — a timeline that contextualizes the company's Q1 2026 results, which showed revenues of $294,000 against a net loss of $19.9 million as the company continues to scale ahead of delivery.

The VAST Data side of the partnership has also moved quickly. In April 2026, VAST Data closed a Series F financing round at a $30 billion valuation, more than tripling its $9.1 billion Series E valuation from late 2023, as enterprise demand for high-throughput AI storage platforms surged globally. The company has separately expanded its footprint in Asia-Pacific by supplying its AI Operating System to Firmus Technologies Group, which is deploying sovereign, energy-efficient AI factories across Australia, Singapore, and the broader region.

AI and Technology Angle

The Sharon AI VAST Data collaboration targets a structural challenge at the core of large-scale AI deployment: storage and data movement bottlenecks that throttle GPU utilization in training, inference, and agentic AI workloads. The VAST AI Operating System is designed to eliminate the traditional separation between storage, database, and compute layers, providing a single unified platform that can feed AI clusters at the speed modern AI factory infrastructure demands.

Standardizing at 600PB also signals Sharon AI's ambition to consolidate its infrastructure around a single, engineered data platform rather than assembling heterogeneous storage tiers — a bet that operational simplicity and performance predictability will become differentiating factors as AI workloads grow in complexity and volume.

Geopolitical Dimension

The sovereign dimension of the partnership is deliberate and commercially significant. Governments across the Asia-Pacific tech corridor — from Canberra to Singapore to Tokyo — have accelerated spending on domestically controlled AI infrastructure as concerns over data residency, export controls, and strategic dependency on foreign cloud providers intensify. The Asia-Pacific sovereign AI infrastructure market is estimated at $13 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach between $23 billion and $47 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of 27 to 35 percent.

Sharon AI's positioning — a Nasdaq-listed company headquartered in Australia, running infrastructure through domestic data centers operated by NEXTDC, powered by NVIDIA compute, and now standardized on VAST AI storage — offers a credible sovereign-compliant alternative for government and regulated-industry customers who cannot route sensitive workloads through hyperscale foreign clouds.

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