Sharon AI Collaborates with VAST Data on the Launch of DataEnclave, Bringing Leading AI Models to Customer Controlled Infrastructure

SharonAI Holdings Inc., a leading Australian Neocloud delivering trusted AI infrastructure, announced a collaboration with VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, to bring VAST DataEnclave, the new confidential AI capability of the VAST DataEngine, to Sharon AI’s AI Factory platform across Australia and Asia-Pacific.

Under the collaboration, Sharon AI will offer VAST DataEnclave as part of its AI Factory platform, giving customers a hardware-isolated secure runtime and cryptographic attestation service for running leading AI models onshore which is not expected to expose data or model weights. VAST’s confidential AI capability is designed to let regulated organizations run advanced AI models onshore in Australia and across Asia-Pacific, including in fully air-gapped environments, without those models or the underlying customer data leaving customer-controlled infrastructure.

For organizations in highly regulated industries, some of the highest-value AI opportunities have remained out of reach because sensitive data cannot leave controlled environments, while model builders have been unable to distribute proprietary models into infrastructure they do not trust. VAST DataEnclave is designed to resolve that impasse: sensitive assets are decrypted and loaded into a secure enclave only after the runtime environment and its enforced policy have been cryptographically verified, and infrastructure operators, including Sharon AI, cannot access customer data or model weights while they are being processed.

The collaboration is expected to significantly expand the number of leading AI models available to Sharon AI customers for mission-critical work where cloud-hosted services are not an option. Customers can now run leading AI models onshore while maintaining control over cost, performance, policy management and security, addressing a longstanding barrier for banks, government agencies and other regulated organizations across the region.

“As a trusted AI infrastructure provider, Sharon AI exists to make secure, scalable and sovereign AI compute available to every organization that needs it,” said James Manning, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sharon AI.

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“Our customers across Australia and Asia-Pacific need to run AI at full speed without compromising on data sovereignty, and increasingly they also want access to frontier models that were previously only available offshore. Building on our sovereign data foundation with VAST DataEnclave is expected to let us host those models onshore, inside attested environments where the model owner’s weights and the customer’s data are both protected from everyone, including us. That should give our customers the flexibility to operate on their own terms, backed by sovereignty they can demonstrate, not just declare.”

VAST DataEnclave establishes a secure container runtime and attestation service directly within the VAST AI Operating System. Proprietary models execute inside confidential virtual machines built on CPU-level trusted execution environments, with NVIDIA GPUs operating in Confidential Compute mode, so guest memory, GPU memory and interconnect traffic all remain encrypted throughout processing.

Sharon AI customers and model builders retain independent control over their respective encryption keys through Bring Your Own KMS integrations, so customer data keys stay within the customer’s trust domain and model keys remain within the model builder’s trust domain at all times. Deployments can run connected, through the DataEnclave attestation service built on the open CNCF Trustee stack, or fully air-gapped, with VAST and Fortanix enabling on-premises attestation and key brokering for customers who cannot connect to external services.

Every attestation event, key release and enclave lifecycle action is recorded in a tamper-proof, queryable audit trail, giving Sharon AI customers visibility into what ran, where and under what verified policy, and is designed to avoid exposing the underlying data or model weights.

“The next phase of sovereign AI requires infrastructure that both enterprises and model builders can trust without having to trust the infrastructure operator itself,” said Sunil Chavan, Vice President, APJ at VAST Data. “Sharon AI is building exactly the kind of regional AI infrastructure where VAST DataEnclave may be able to change what’s possible, giving customers across Australia and Asia-Pacific access to leading AI models while allowing both sides to retain control of their most valuable intellectual property.”

The collaboration should reinforce Sharon AI’s role as a trusted AI infrastructure partner for regulated industries, equipped to deliver gigawatt scale AI compute securely and with sovereignty at its core, and extending its sovereign AI Factory platform to support attested, confidential AI workloads alongside its existing security, governance and compliance capabilities.