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Renen Hallak

CEO & Founder, Vast Data

Search every verified Renen Hallak interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Renen Hallak, CEO and co-founder of VAST Data, has recently discussed the company's role in AI infrastructure across several podcast appearances. He described VAST Data as operating in the software infrastructure layer of the AI stack, managing data for training and inference workloads, and noted the company's valuation at $30 billion. Hallak stated that customers, including AI cloud providers, have significantly increased their data capacity demands, with one customer adding 2 exabytes on top of a planned 500 petabytes over three years. He also discussed VAST Data's DataEnclave, an announcement made with NVIDIA, which he said enables confidential AI by allowing proprietary models to run on sensitive data in customer-controlled environments, including air-gapped systems. Hallak commented on developments in AI, saying that if OpenAI solved the Navier-Stokes problem, it would demonstrate AI's ability to generate new intellectual property. He described the current regulatory environment for AI as the "wild west," noting uncertainty about rules and data usage guidelines. Hallak also said that AI intelligence will become a basic need over time, similar to electricity or water, and that data infrastructure must scale and distribute across data centers, edge locations, and devices to support latency and sovereignty requirements. He identified security and simplicity as the two biggest challenges to making AI more widespread, citing enterprise concerns about data exposure and lack of in-house expertise.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think this becomes a basic need over time. In the same way that electricity is a basic need or that water is a basic need, AI intelligence will be a basic need. We will not be able to live in the way that we would like to live without it. And so in the world that we are in today, countries are adversarial one to the other and they don't trust each other. And in the business community, as much as we have competition”

“The demand is there today. I'm not sure it gives me comfort and sometimes it scares me as to how much demand is there and the acceleration in demand because every quarter our customers are coming back to us and telling us they need a lot more than they thought they did. We had a customer, one of these AI clouds, one of the smaller ones come to us a quarter ago and we told them we need to plan ahead for the next 3 yea”

“I think right now it's the wild west. Nobody really understands what the rules are, what is allowed, what is difficult, what is not supposed to happen. We were just talking about this breakthrough that OpenAI just did with Math Proof and then immediately a question arises: did they use information that mathematicians brought into OpenAI? And as far as I can tell right now they don't know the answer of whether they us”

“It is the biggest challenge that we have. I think the two biggest challenges that we have in order to make AI more widespread is security and simplicity. When you talk to these large enterprises, they're both under regulation not allowed to expose their information and also they don't want to expose their information. They've spent a long time accumulating it on the one hand. On the other hand, they don't have a team”

“I think data is the defining characteristic of this new era of AI. It's surprisingly relatively old algorithms neural nets that have been around for many many decades but they haven't been very successful until recently because we couldn't give them enough access to enough information. And so all of these large training runs and now as we do model serving and inference and agentic workloads that's all a data centric ”

“Us, for example, if you look at the combination of those two things, our rule of 40 is at 228%. It's that combination of extremely fast growth and efficiency. And that's what you're seeing with Nvidia and that's what you're seeing with anyone who's building this.”

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