VAST Data's Biggest Customer Is Now Building VAST's Layer
CoreWeave, the customer VAST Data's $30 billion April round leans on, just bundled storage into its own platform and priced VAST as one partner among four. The neocloud funds the climb with 2.875% converts; VAST's newest customers borrow at 9.95%.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
A partner badge on the competitor's stage
On 30 September, at CoreWeave's Fully Connected conference in San Francisco, VAST Data appeared as one of four headline partners in a curated integration network, beside CrowdStrike, Reflection and ClickHouse 12. The same stage launched CoreWeave Forge, a platform folding compute, storage, model sandboxes and Weights & Biases tooling into one environment for its 4,500 customers 2. Storage, once something CoreWeave bought, is now something CoreWeave sells.
What the $30 billion rests on
VAST raised $1 billion in April 2026 at a $30 billion valuation, more than triple its $9.1 billion 2023 mark, with over $500 million of secondary going to employees and early investors 34. The company claims more than $4 billion in cumulative bookings and over $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue 34. Beneath it sits a $1.17 billion agreement CoreWeave signed in November 2025, reported to make VAST the primary data foundation of the CoreWeave cloud and CoreWeave VAST's largest customer; that figure rests on a single report, and no filing says how much of the ARR it carries 3.
The customer moved into the data layer
Days before the conference, CoreWeave added cross-region write acceleration and an archive tier to its own AI Object Storage, to keep data close to GPUs 1. That is VAST's thesis, a waiting GPU is a wasted GPU, rebuilt in-house by the customer whose clusters made it famous.
The burn behind the platform push
CoreWeave has outspent its own revenue on capex for eight straight quarters
- Revenue
- Capex
Data
| Revenue | Capex | |
|---|---|---|
| Q3 '24 | $0.58B | $1.22B |
| Q4 '24 | $0.75B | $3.5B |
| Q1 '25 | $0.98B | $1.41B |
| Q2 '25 | $1.21B | $2.45B |
| Q3 '25 | $1.37B | $2.39B |
| Q4 '25 | $1.57B | $4.06B |
| Q1 '26 | $2.08B | $7.7B |
| Q2 '26 | $2.58B | $6.42B |
CoreWeave has spent more on capex than it earned in revenue in each of the last eight reported quarters, $6.4 billion against $2.6 billion in the June 2026 quarter alone 9. The financing followed on 17 September: a $3.7 billion convertible note at 2.875%, upsized from $3.0 billion and due 2033, plus an at-the-market program for up to 35 million shares 51. Management says short-term contracts now clear at $40 million per megawatt on three-to-six-month terms 1.
VAST's numbers still stand
VAST is free-cash-flow positive with revenue roughly tripling year over year, and its DataEnclave confidential-AI product ships through Cisco and Supermicro in the first quarter of 2027 36. A partner network is not a displacement, and Forge is a developer layer, not a petabyte-scale file system. But both roadmaps now chase the same promise: data that never leaves the compute.
Two prices for the same money
SharonAI, VAST's newest channel partner, is deploying DataEnclave across Australia and Asia-Pacific, and on 1 October borrowed $356 million against GPUs at 9.95% to fund it 78. VAST's expansion runs on 9.95% money; CoreWeave's runs on 2.875% paper 58. The data layer will be owned by whoever borrows cheapest. The next reading is VAST's own: bankers have been told an IPO could come in the second half of 2026 or later 3.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
