Jeff Denworth, Vast Data | Raise Summit 2026
00:00 - Title: "Advancements in AI Infrastructure and VAST Data Achievements
02:30 - Title: Navigating Growth: Balancing Investments and Market Challenges
05:24 - Driving Innovation: AI Partnerships and Future Storage
08:30 - Advancing Storage in the Cloud Era
11:13 - Strategic Growth and Forward-Thinking
14:08 - Title: "Emerging Trends in Collaborative Computing and Data Optimization
What Jeff Denworth said
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Jeff Denworth, cofounder of Vast Data, discussed the company's recent $30 billion valuation, attributing it to tangible market leadership validated by professional investors. He highlighted the increasing scale of customer investments, with some customers growing from $1 million to $200 million annually. Denworth addressed the challenge of rising flash costs, noting a 6x increase in recent months, and the capacity constraints forcing some customers to turn away business. He emphasized Vast's role in enabling neoclouds and AI clouds, mentioning partnerships with Nvidia (22 co-engineering projects), Okami, and Megaport. Denworth touted a one exabyte AI storage cluster supporting 300,000 GPUs, claiming it surpasses anything from AWS. He outlined upcoming products: a RAG pipeline, an agent deployment framework called Agent Engine, a fine-tuning engine, and confidential computing work. He also discussed KV cache storage as a growing market and Nvidia's CMX project.
Key takeaways
Vast Data closed a funding round at a $30 billion valuation, with Nvidia as an investor.
Flash costs have risen about 6x in recent months, forcing customers to adjust budgets and turn away business due to capacity constraints.
Vast built a one exabyte AI storage cluster supporting 300,000 GPUs, larger than any system from AWS or others.
Vast will release an agent deployment framework called Agent Engine at the end of summer 2026.
Welcome back to the Cube live stream here in Paris, France. I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube. We're at the Race Summit day two wall to wall coverage. Again the big story continues to be on an international global level AI infrastructure continuing to be invested in and expanding and innovating and that's powering in the agentic layer and of course all the AI native applications we're seeing here on stage, replete with Lovable, you name it, a lot of action happening, open source weighted models. I mean this is a tsunami of innovation, but the infrastructure still is going to go on and we think for another generation we're paving new roads, we're pouring the concrete for AI infrastructure. And a big part of that is the storage layer or the data layer or the data operating layer. And of course, Vast Data is one of the leaders leading the charge. Jeff Denworth, the co-founder, Cube alumni. Great to see you here in Paris. You got your Vastronaut shirt on.
Huge validation. Yeah. I know you guys don't get hung up on the validations. It's more of a metric of success and value of course, but it really shows the validation of the work you guys have done, the revenue you've generated, but also the architectural decision you made and how you guys executed. So give us an update on what's changed in the past year for you guys. Has it been more of the same? Keep doing deals, keep pumping out product, or has there been any real change?
Yeah, I think you're right. I think the valuation from our perspective, there's a lot of hyperbole, there's a lot of hype in this market. And to have professional investors do the diligence to confirm that our market leadership is tangible and is real, it's helpful for us to kind of inspire confidence in our future customers. And there's no conference that has more of our customers combined than Raise. If I took a ping pong ball and shot it across this cube, I could hit four customers just over there. So we've been really fortunate to execute. And I think a few things have changed. First is the scale of investments has just gotten so much bigger. We have customers that will go from spending $1 million in a year to $10 million in a year to $200 million in a year. You don't need a lot of that to start making some really big dents in the market. From the perspective of our home field advantage, you talked about we were in the river earlier, I love that analogy – we just jumped in and now we're going with the current. The current is getting stronger and wider. There are new players getting into the market all the time, both from a platform perspective and from a cloud perspective, and we've done a great job helping clouds build out their service layer in a way that gives customers a very predictable and robust service experience. One of the things I love to explain to new clouds we work with is that Vast is the company you work with so you don't have to pay penalties back to your customers, because operating at this scale there's a lot of fragility with other technologies that we just don't have. People love us because it's industrial-grade AI data systems.
Well, two things I want to unpack. One is they have to stand up infrastructure fast and then run it and stand up again more. So there's growth on all sides. So they don't want to have to get in the mud and deal with issues. That's an operating lag for them. And you guys take that away.
Yes. And I think now the end customers, these are called offtakers in this industry, are understanding the value that we bring to those clouds and they're asking for us as they move from cloud to cloud to cloud. So that's been great. The market is obviously super challenging from a hardware perspective right now. I don't know how much you've been talking about that at this event, but for us it's crazy what's happening. Cost of flash has gone up maybe 6x in the last few months. Customers adjusting to this new normal that may go out for a few years has been a big adjustment. Organizations that just can't get enough capacity right now and are having to do things like turn away customers because they're capacity constrained. We're a software company, we can facilitate as much as we possibly can from a hardware perspective, but there's only so much we can do. And then they have to adjust their budgets to accommodate this new normal.
Nvidia has been a great partner. They're a customer, they're a partner. We co-engineer. The last QBR we had, we counted something like 22 engineering projects that we run with Nvidia. We kind of came out of nowhere a few years ago and they were like, who are these guys? And now we're so deeply embedded in their teams and their teams are embedded in ours. It's a terrific partnership.
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Denworth, J. (2026, July 9). Jeff Denworth, Vast Data | Raise Summit 2026 [Interview transcript]. SiliconANGLE theCUBE. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1074237/
MLA
Jeff Denworth. "Jeff Denworth, Vast Data | Raise Summit 2026." SiliconANGLE theCUBE, 9 Jul. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1074237/.
BibTeX
@misc{denworth2026_1074237,
author = {Jeff Denworth},
title = {Jeff Denworth, Vast Data | Raise Summit 2026},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, SiliconANGLE theCUBE. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1074237/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
