Roadmap & Vision · chrislabs.ai

The AI Operating System

VAST's thesis is that the AI era needs an operating system, not a pile of point products. Storage, a transactional + analytical database, Kafka-compatible streaming, serverless compute, and governed agents are converging onto one platform so that data, compute, and intelligence live in the same place. Unveiled as the “AI OS” at VAST Forward (May 2025), the roadmap below is how that vision gets filled in.

Today

Storage, VAST DB, Event Broker, DataEngine, VectorStore, and the DataSpace global namespace - the data substrate is shipping.

The goal

A self-improving system that observes, reasons, acts, evaluates and improves next to the data.

What ships when

The platform spans a spectrum from available-now infrastructure to stated vision. Filter by maturity so you can separate what a customer can deploy today from what is still a roadmap commitment.

VAST AI OS - what ships when

Filter by maturity, then pick a milestone to see what it does and why it matters. Status labels follow VAST's own framing.

Available nowMay 2025

VAST AI OS unveiled

At VAST Forward, the company positioned its stack as the 'AI Operating System' - a single platform spanning storage, database, streaming, serverless compute and agents, rather than a collection of products. It is the umbrella the rest of this roadmap fills in.

Dates, status and the ~44% Sirius query-time figure are VAST-reported (VAST Forward / company announcements). Roadmap items and their timing are subject to change.

The engines of the AI OS

These pieces turn the platform from a place data lives into a place intelligence runs. Each is GPU- or AI-native by design - one is shipping today, the rest are on the roadmap.

DataSpace

Available now

One consistent global namespace across edge, on-prem and every cloud, so the same data is addressable everywhere with no copies. Shipping now and extended to Google Cloud (Nov 2025) - letting training and inference follow GPU capacity.

Sirius (GPU SQL)

Roadmap

CNode-X compute tier + RAPIDS cuDF/cuVS bring GPU-accelerated SQL to VAST DB. VAST reports ~44% query-time reduction - analytics move from CPU-bound to GPU-bound on the same data.

PolicyEngine + TuningEngine

Roadmap · end 2026

Zero-trust governance for autonomous agents, plus automated LoRA/SFT/RL fine-tuning driven by platform data. Both targeted for end of 2026.

Sirius ~44% query-time figure and all roadmap dates are VAST-reported and subject to change.

The “Thinking Machine”

The roadmap isn't a list of features for their own sake - every piece is a stage in a single closed loop. When observation, reasoning, action, evaluation and improvement all run next to the data, the platform stops being passive storage and starts continuously improving itself. Step through the loop below.

The closed loop: observe → reason → act → evaluate → improve

VAST's “Thinking Machine” vision - a continuous loop that runs next to the data instead of shipping data out to it.

Observe

New data lands - files, objects, events, telemetry.

On VAST

Event Broker + DataEngine triggers detect arrivals in real time.

The loop framing is VAST's stated vision; PolicyEngine and TuningEngine are roadmap items (targeted end 2026).

Why this matters for AI

The bottleneck in AI infrastructure has moved from raw FLOPs to keeping GPUs fed with fresh, governed data. Each roadmap item attacks a different part of that problem: Sirius removes the CPU query bottleneck, DataSpace removes the data-gravity bottleneck, and PolicyEngine/TuningEngine let the loop run autonomously without losing control. Together they aim to make the data platform itself the AI factory.

For the data center

One platform instead of separate storage, warehouse, streaming and vector systems - less data movement, fewer copies, lower latency from ingest to insight.

For AI teams

Fresh context for RAG and agents, GPU-speed analytics, and a governed path to fine-tune on your own data - the full observe-to-improve loop without a fleet of glue services.