VAST Data DIGITAL

Request ID: 28049101-2e1b-47c7-a30e-2966a1ef286e Research date: 29 September 2026 Domain: Digital Forensics (Digital)

Enterprise Technology Stack & Vendor Relationships

Core technology stack

VAST Data’s current product is a general-purpose data and AI infrastructure platform. Its AI Operating System combines the DataStore storage layer, DataBase for structured, unstructured and vector data, DataEngine for data processing, and DataSpace for a distributed namespace spanning data-centre, edge and cloud environments.^{1, 2}

VAST also offers deployment through AWS. The AWS Marketplace listing describes the VAST Data Platform as deployable for enterprise data and AI workloads, while VAST’s own AWS documentation describes VAST on Cloud clusters operating with the Polaris cloud control plane.^{3, 4}

VAST announced in March 2024 that it had worked with NVIDIA on an AI-infrastructure architecture using NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs, with VAST software running as part of that architecture.⁵

Israeli-origin software and services used by VAST

No public evidence identified in the reviewed sources established that VAST itself currently procures or embeds Check Point, Wiz, SentinelOne, CyberArk, NICE, Verint, Claroty, Palo Alto Networks or another specifically Israeli-origin security product as a material component of VAST’s own enterprise infrastructure.

VAST’s 2022 global-expansion announcement documented operations in Israel and international distributor relationships, but it did not identify an Israeli-origin cybersecurity vendor as a required component of VAST’s platform.⁶

Scale of dependency

No public evidence identified for a material VAST dependency on an Israeli-origin cybersecurity, communications or analytics supplier. The directly verified Israeli nexus instead concerns VAST’s own Israeli engineering footprint and VAST technology supplied into Israeli infrastructure, addressed below.

Procurement and systems integrators

No public evidence identified that a named systems integrator acting for VAST mandated or deployed an Israeli-origin security or analytics product inside VAST’s enterprise stack.

Surveillance, Biometrics & Retail Technology

Facial recognition and biometrics

No public evidence identified that VAST develops or sells facial-recognition, biometric-identification, gait-analysis or frictionless-retail technology. VAST’s documented product is general-purpose storage, database and AI infrastructure capable of hosting customer data and AI workloads.^{1, 2}

No public evidence identified that VAST’s ability to store vectors or unstructured data constitutes provision of a biometric application.

Predictive analytics and monitoring

No public evidence identified that VAST provides Israeli-origin predictive-policing, sentiment-analysis, social-media-monitoring or workforce-surveillance systems.

Third-party deployment

No public evidence identified that VAST indirectly supplies a named Israeli facial-recognition, spyware, predictive-policing or behavioural-surveillance product through a bundled platform or managed service.

Cloud Infrastructure, Data Residency & Sovereign Cloud Participation

Israeli sovereign-AI infrastructure

On 30 September 2025, VAST announced a strategic partnership with Shonfeld Data Services (SDS) to power what VAST described as one of Israel’s largest sovereign-AI cloud environments. VAST said the infrastructure would combine dozens of petabytes of VAST-powered data infrastructure with thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and NVIDIA networking, and described government among the sectors intended to use the platform.⁷

Independent reporting corroborated the project. Globes reported that the Bet Yehoshua facility represented an investment of approximately NIS 1 billion, would initially contain roughly 2,000 NVIDIA Blackwell B200 GPUs and would include tens of petabytes of data infrastructure operated using VAST technology.⁸ CTech separately reported the VAST-SDS strategic partnership and the planned sovereign-AI infrastructure.⁹

The announced role is structural and continuing rather than merely incidental. VAST calls the arrangement a long-term strategic partnership, describes its AI Operating System as the foundation of the sovereign-AI environment, and states that SDS plans to further integrate VAST technology as the platform expands. VAST also says SDS selected the platform after evaluating leading AI data platforms and emphasizes non-disruptive scaling, continuous expansion and long-term hardware-generation upgrades.⁷ CTech likewise describes the system as being built on VAST’s AI Operating System and as a national-scale AI cloud ecosystem, while Globes reports the very large physical and financial scale of the build.^{8, 9}

No reviewed source states that VAST is easily replaceable in this deployment, describes the deployment as a short-term pilot, or provides evidence of low switching cost. Conversely, the public record does not quantify technical lock-in or contractual switching penalties. The evidence therefore supports describing VAST as a large-scale, long-term, structurally integrated data-platform provider to the SDS sovereign-AI build, without assuming either technical lock-in or easy replaceability.^{7, 8, 9}

Before the VAST announcement, CTech reported in August 2025 that SDS was building a 2,032-GPU Blackwell B200 AI supercomputer intended to be available to Israeli business and academic users.¹⁰ This establishes the underlying SDS AI programme’s scale but does not, by itself, establish VAST’s role before the September partnership announcement.

SDS also had a substantial Israeli data-centre footprint before this project. A 2023 Globes report described five SDS data centres and noted that its Modi’in facility hosted Google and Microsoft cloud services in Israel.¹¹ That earlier hosting relationship does not establish that VAST supplies Google, Microsoft or Project Nimbus workloads.

Project Nimbus and government cloud

No public evidence identified that VAST is a named Project Nimbus prime contractor, subcontractor or technology supplier. The VAST-SDS sovereign-AI cloud is independently documented, but SDS’s separate relationship with Google or Microsoft cannot be used to attribute Nimbus participation to VAST.^{7, 11}

VAST’s own September 2025 announcement states that government is one of the sectors targeted by the SDS sovereign-AI platform, but it does not name an Israeli ministry, agency, military service or specific government contract.⁷

Data sovereignty and data exposure

VAST’s platform is designed to store, organize and process customer data across storage, database and AI workloads.^{1, 2} The SDS project therefore represents direct provision of core data infrastructure inside an Israeli sovereign-AI environment, rather than merely VAST purchasing a product from an Israeli supplier.^{7, 8}

VAST’s current Call Home documentation describes a separate support-data path. It states that clusters can transmit logs, metrics, heartbeats and system-state information to VAST, with the default destination including an AWS S3 bucket maintained by VAST. The support channel can permit VAST Support to initiate collection of a Call Home bundle. VAST also provides an optional obfuscation setting for fields including file and directory names, IP addresses, host names, user names, passwords and MAC addresses.¹²

VAST’s support-bundle documentation similarly allows diagnostic bundles to be sent to VAST and provides an option to obfuscate sensitive data before transmission.¹³

For VAST on Cloud on AWS, VAST states that the deployment uses the Polaris cloud-based control plane and that a local agent sends telemetry outbound to the service.³

These public documents do not identify the geographic region of the support S3 bucket or Polaris service, do not say that those services are hosted in Israel, and do not establish that Israeli-based VAST employees access a particular customer’s diagnostic information or payload data. The presence of Israeli R&D staff therefore does not establish that all VAST customer data is exposed to Israeli jurisdiction.

Constructive-notice timing

The VAST-SDS sovereign-AI partnership was announced on 30 September 2025.^{7, 8} The documented provision therefore began or was publicly formalized after 19 July 2024 and after November 2024. This is a chronological observation only.

Settlement nexus

No public evidence identified that the VAST-SDS facility, a VAST data centre, or another VAST-controlled digital facility is located in an Israeli settlement or elsewhere in internationally recognized occupied territory.

Defence, Intelligence & Security Sector Technology Relationships

IAI / ELTA Systems

A currently retrievable Israeli recruitment-page mirror for an IAI – ELTA Systems Storage & Backup Specialist vacancy states that the role includes management of central storage systems based on Dell EMC, NetApp and VAST.¹⁴

A June 2024 SEC-filed Israeli Government Companies Authority report states that the Government holds 100% of Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael, both described as defence-oriented government-owned companies.¹⁵ A current Israeli Ministry of Defense release identifies IAI as the prime developer of the Arrow system and ELTA as a participant in its production.¹⁶

The combined evidence supports a limited finding that VAST storage technology is publicly identified within ELTA’s enterprise storage environment.^{14, 15, 16} The vacancy does not identify a VAST contract value, procurement route, weapons programme, operational intelligence dataset, targeting workload or IDF deployment.

Israeli Ministry of Defense, IDF and intelligence agencies

No public evidence identified for a direct VAST contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, IDF, Mossad or Israel Security Agency in the reviewed sources.

Dual-use technology

The IAI/ELTA evidence concerns VAST’s general-purpose storage infrastructure.¹⁴ General-purpose enterprise storage supplied to a defence company remains digital infrastructure; no reviewed source established that VAST’s product was purpose-built for a kinetic military effect.

Offensive cyber and digital weapons

No public evidence identified that VAST develops, sells, licenses or maintains offensive-cyber exploits, spyware, zero-day capabilities or digital weapons for Israeli state actors.

AI, Algorithmic & Autonomous Systems

AI/ML provision

The VAST-SDS project is explicitly an AI infrastructure project. VAST described the planned sovereign cloud as using thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs together with dozens of petabytes of VAST data infrastructure and said that government was among its intended sectors.⁷ Globes and CTech independently documented the large-scale AI-compute project and VAST’s role.^{8, 9, 10}

The sources identify general-purpose AI infrastructure rather than a particular state AI application.^{7, 8, 9, 10} No reviewed source names a government agency, military unit or security service using the SDS-VAST platform.

VAST’s September 2026 DataEnclave announcement further shows that VAST develops infrastructure for bringing AI models to sensitive enterprise data inside customer-controlled or trusted environments.¹⁷ no public evidence identified a DataEnclave deployment for an Israeli state or security body.

Training data and model development

No public evidence identified that VAST itself trained an AI model on Palestinian civilian data, intercepted communications or surveillance-derived datasets from Israel or occupied territory.

VAST supplies infrastructure on which customers can store and process datasets, but customer capability alone does not establish the provenance or use of any particular dataset.^{1, 2}

Autonomous systems and lethality

No public evidence identified that VAST provides autonomous target generation, fire-control AI, kill-chain automation, automated lethal decision-making or another purpose-built targeting system.

Technology Ecosystem & R&D Footprint

Israeli R&D centres

VAST’s own April 2022 engineering announcement said that its engineering team had previously remained concentrated in Tel Aviv as the company expanded its U.S. engineering presence and that VAST intended to keep growing the Israeli engineering team.¹⁸

A 2025 CTech profile reported that VAST was founded in 2016 by Israeli entrepreneurs Renen Hallak and Shachar Fienblit and maintained R&D centres in Tel Aviv and Haifa.¹⁹ Ynet separately described VAST as having two development centres in Israel.²⁰

VAST’s February 2022 global-expansion announcement also listed Israel among the countries in which it had established operations alongside regional sales, technical-support, marketing and customer-service expansion.⁶

The evidence therefore supports an ongoing Israeli engineering and business footprint.^{18, 6} no public evidence identified that a particular non-Israeli customer’s data is transferred to the Israeli R&D centres.

Acquisitions and investments

No public evidence identified that VAST acquired an Israeli spyware, surveillance, offensive-cyber or military-technology company.

No verified public evidence identified a controlling VAST founder or executive making a personal investment, in a capacity attributable under this audit, in NSO Group, Cellebrite, Carbyne, Oosto/AnyVision, Check Point, SentinelOne, NICE, Verint or another named surveillance/SIGINT/military-technology firm.

Patents, universities and co-development

No public evidence identified for a material VAST patent-licensing or co-development agreement with the Technion, Hebrew University, Weizmann Institute or another Israeli academic institution.

Technology partners

VAST’s documented strategic technology relationships include NVIDIA, including its 2024 BlueField-3 AI-factory architecture.⁵ VAST also distributes its platform through AWS Marketplace and supports AWS-hosted VAST on Cloud deployments.^{3, 4}

These relationships are relevant to the platform’s technical supply chain.^{3, 4, 5} no public evidence identified that they independently constitute Israeli-state provision.

Civil Society Scrutiny & Regulatory History

NGO, UN and academic scrutiny

Target-specific searches of the authoritative and specialist sources specified for this audit did not identify a verifiable VAST-specific finding concerning settlement business activity, surveillance of Palestinians or provision to Israeli military/intelligence operations.

No public evidence identified in the reviewed material that VAST is named as a settlement-related business in the relevant OHCHR material or as a target-specific company entry in the reviewed Who Profits, AFSC Investigate, Don’t Buy Into Occupation, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Al-Haq, SOMO or BDS material.

Boycott and divestment campaigns

No verifiable organized boycott, divestment or sanctions campaign directed specifically at VAST because of its technology provision was identified.

No public evidence identified from reliable primary or independent sources substantiating the location claim in an online petition alleging a VAST data-centre connection to occupied Palestinian land; the petition was not treated as evidence.

Regulatory and legal actions

No public evidence identified of a regulator, court, export-control authority or sanctions authority bringing an action specifically concerning VAST technology supplied to an Israeli state, military or security entity.

Evidence limits

The strongest verified Israel-specific digital relationships are:

1. VAST’s direct September 2025 partnership with SDS to provide the data layer for a large Israeli sovereign-AI cloud;^{7, 8, 9}
2. VAST’s continuing Israeli R&D/business footprint in Tel Aviv and Haifa;^{18, 19, 20, 6}
3. a public IAI/ELTA vacancy explicitly identifying VAST among central storage technologies in that state-owned defence company’s IT environment;^{14, 15, 16}

No public evidence identified in the reviewed material of Project Nimbus participation, an IDF/Israeli Ministry of Defense/intelligence-agency contract, a settlement deployment, offensive-cyber provision, biometric-surveillance provision, or purpose-built autonomous targeting by VAST.

For magnitude and continuity, the SDS evidence is unusually specific: dozens/tens of petabytes of VAST-operated data infrastructure, thousands/about 2,000 Blackwell GPUs in the initial build, an approximately NIS 1 billion project, and VAST’s own description of a long-term strategic partnership with planned further integration.^{7, 8, 9} No reviewed source supports treating that role as easily replaceable; equally, no source quantifies contractual or technical lock-in.