VAST Data Expands Footprint in Canada as Major HPC and AI Centers Standardize on Its AI Operating System

New updates have been reported about VAST Data (PC:VASTD)

VAST Data is deepening its presence in Canada’s AI and high-performance computing ecosystem as key national research centers and AI institutes standardize on the VAST AI Operating System to support large-scale GPU workloads. SciNet at the University of Toronto and SHARCNET at the University of Waterloo have both adopted VAST as their core data and AI operating platform, building on earlier Canadian deployments with infrastructure providers that use VAST to power GPU cloud services. This consolidation gives VAST a central role in Canada’s academic and research compute infrastructure, positioning the company as a foundational technology provider for institutions running mixed traditional HPC and next-generation AI workloads. For VAST, these wins underscore product-market fit in environments requiring high scalability, resilience, and simplified operations with lean teams.

SciNet, one of Canada’s five national academic HPC sites and home to the Trillium supercomputer, has chosen VAST to underpin its third-generation system, which includes roughly 240,000 CPU cores and 250 GPUs, allowing it to eliminate legacy tiered storage models and support diverse HPC and AI workloads on a single platform. SHARCNET, another national host site and operator of the new Nibi cluster at the University of Waterloo, is using VAST AI OS as the data layer for a system comprising more than 135,000 CPU cores, 288 GPUs and advanced immersion cooling, serving thousands of researchers across disciplines from bioinformatics to economics. SHARCNET reports that VAST’s platform has quietly absorbed billions of files and highly variable I/O patterns without disrupting cluster performance, highlighting operational stability as a key value driver. VAST sees these deployments as validation that its unified AI operating system can serve as a common data and compute fabric for Canada’s innovation economy, from academic research to production AI services, and is using this momentum as a platform to engage customers and partners further through its upcoming VAST Forward user conference in early 2026.