AI storage vendor Vast Data has collaborated with Microsoft in its second hyperscaler deal in as many weeks.

Announced at Microsoft’s ongoing Ignite event in San Francisco, the Vast AI Operating System is promised to provide businesses with a simple way to deploy high-performance, scalable AI infrastructure in the Azure cloud.

Enterprises will be able to access Vast’s suite of data services in Azure, including unified storage, data cataloging, and database capabilities to support complex AI workflows. This integration is set to enable organizations to manage data easily across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, delivering the capabilities and automation required to boost AI innovation.

Jeff Denworth, co-founder at Vast Data, said: “This collaboration with Microsoft reflects our shared vision for the future of AI infrastructure, where performance, scale, and simplicity converge to enable enterprises to transform their business with agentic AI.” He also dubbed the Azure partnership “the first milestone in that journey.”

The Vast AI OS will run on Azure infrastructure, enabling users to deploy and operate it using the same tools, governance, security, and billing frameworks they are used to. The new addition was designed to deliver unified management, consistent performance, and Azure-grade reliability.

Some of the features of Vast AI OS running on Azure will include high performance for model builders, designed for the demands of model training and inference, and seamless hybrid AI workflows where exabyte-scale DataSpace creates a unified global namespace to eliminate data silos. In this way, users can burst from on-premises to Azure for GPU-accelerated workloads without migration or reconfiguration, Vast Data said.

As part of the collaboration, Vast will work closely with the Azure team to align on next-generation platform requirements and become a strategic element of Microsoft’s broader AI computing strategy.

Only last week, Vast Data partnered up with Google Cloud in what was its first hyperscaler deal, making its AI OS available as a fully managed service across hybrid environments. As part of that agreement, the Vast DataSpace will enable users to connect clusters running in Google Cloud and on-premises.

Vast Data also recently landed a $1.17 billion deal with CoreWeave, where Vast’s AI OS will serve as the primary data storage and management platform under the neocloud’s compute infrastructure. Vast’s OS will feed data to all of the AI training and inference workloads for major CoreWeave customers like Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

The continued push for AI in hybrid cloud environments this year was underpinned by Gartner research predicting that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach by the end of 2027. At the same time, the company’s research outlined that the most urgent generative AI (genAI) challenge necessary to address will be data synchronization across the hybrid cloud environment.