NEW YORK, NY, Oct 1, 2026 – Sharon AI will offer VAST DataEnclave through its AI Factory platform to run AI models onshore across Australia and Asia-Pacific. The integration is designed to protect customer data and proprietary model weights from infrastructure operators, including Sharon AI, during processing.
VAST DataEnclave, part of VAST DataEngine, provides a hardware-isolated runtime and cryptographic attestation service within the VAST AI Operating System. It verifies the runtime environment before decrypting sensitive assets and loading them into a secure enclave.
The service is intended for banks, government agencies and organizations that cannot use externally hosted AI services. Sharon AI expects the integration to expand their choice of models while retaining controls over cost, performance, policies and security.
“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.
“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 provides a secure container runtime and attestation service within the VAST AI Operating System. Proprietary models execute inside virtual machines built on CPU-level trusted execution environments. NVIDIA GPUs operate in Confidential Compute mode, with encryption covering guest memory, GPU memory and interconnect traffic during processing.
Customers control their encryption keys through Bring Your Own KMS integrations. Customer data keys remain within the customer’s domain, while model keys remain within the model builder’s domain.
Connected deployments use the VAST DataEnclave attestation service, built on the CNCF Trustee stack. For air-gapped deployments, VAST and Fortanix provide on-premises attestation and key brokering without connections to external services. Both configurations keep models and customer data within customer-controlled infrastructure.
VAST DataEnclave records every attestation event, release and enclave lifecycle action in a searchable audit trail. VAST describes the log as tamper-proof and designed to document what ran, where and under which policy without exposing 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 integration will operate alongside Sharon AI’s existing security, governance and compliance capabilities.
Source: Sharon AI
About Sharon AI
Sharon AI is a high-performance computing company founded in 2021 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia. The company provides cloud GPU services, AI computing infrastructure, and data storage systems for organizations that run compute-heavy workloads. Sharon AI offers virtual machines, GPU-as-a-service options, and cloud capacity designed for AI training, machine learning development, and high-performance computing tasks. The company supports customers that work with generative AI, large-language models, and scientific or engineering simulations. Sharon AI serves businesses, research institutions, and government agencies that require flexible access to GPU clusters and sovereign cloud environments. The company designs its systems to support resource-intensive projects and to handle datasets in production or research settings. Sharon AI operates its services through an Australian data center and maintains infrastructure to support high-bandwidth networking, distributed training, and data lifecycle management. The company also provides workload management tools that help users deploy applications, manage storage, and allocate GPU resources for specific tasks.
About Vast Data
VAST Data, founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York City, develops software for data storage and processing. Its VAST AI Operating System combines storage, database and computing services for artificial intelligence, analytics, cloud and high-performance computing workloads. Products include DataStore for file and object storage, DataBase and DataEngine, which runs functions across data centers and cloud regions. Customers include enterprises, cloud providers, government agencies and research organizations. The company serves life sciences, media, animation and visual effects, public sector and financial trading.
