• Lablup and VAST Data Power Korea’s Sovereign AI Initiative
• Collaboration resolves performance bottlenecks and enables large-scale model training across 500+ GPUs, advancing Korea’s national AI infrastructure.

Lablup Inc., the developer of the open, scalable AI computing platform Backend.AI and a key participant in South Korea’s government-backed Sovereign AI Project today announced a strategic collaboration with VAST Data, the AI Operating System company. Together, the companies have built a high-performance, scalable data foundation that enables Korea’s national AI consortium, which aims for technological self-reliance, to train and deploy large-language models entirely on domestic infrastructure.

Backend.AI provides a unified environment for AI model training, deployment, and inference across GPU and CPU resources. By integrating the VAST AI Operating System, Lablup and its customers can manage training data, model checkpoints, and artifacts with unmatched throughput and resilience, ensuring smooth data flows from model development to real-time serving.

As Lablup’s AI workloads grew, traditional infrastructure storage systems struggled to keep pace with the throughput and concurrency required for foundation-model training. The team turned to VAST Data to modernize its data layer, eliminating performance bottlenecks while maintaining reliability and control for multi-tenant research environments.

Running on SK Telecom’s Sovereign AI cluster, the integrated Backend.AI and VAST AI Operating System now orchestrates and accelerates model training across more than 500 NVIDIA GPUs, giving Korean researchers a unified environment for both training and, in the future, inference.

“Our mission has always been to democratize AI infrastructure through open, efficient, and scalable technology,” said Jeongkyu Shin, Founder and CEO of Lablup Inc. “By integrating VAST’s AI Operating System into Backend.AI environments, we’re enabling developers and enterprises to handle massive datasets and complex workloads with the reliability and performance that modern AI demands. It’s a technological synergy that really unlocks the full potential of our AI compute while ensuring sovereignty and data security.”

Through direct integration with the VAST AI Operating System, Backend.AI achieves seamless, high-throughput access to data for massive training workloads.Using VAST’s Disaggregated, Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, Lablup can scale compute and storage independently while maintaining a single global namespace, VAST DataSpace, enabling researchers to access checkpoints, datasets, and model outputs instantly across projects.

Powering Lablup’s role in Korea’s Sovereign AI initiative, the Backend.AI and VAST AI Operating System deliver everything from large-scale model training to real-time orchestration, including:

• Sovereign Data Control: AI sovereignty begins and ends with data infrastructure. Built on VAST DataSpace and the AI Operating System’s Zero Trust architecture, Lablup enforces data residency, access control, and compliance across Korea’s Sovereign AI environments. For government, research, and regulated enterprise participants in the national consortium, this ensures not just where data lives, but how it’s protected, governed, and audited throughout the AI lifecycle.
• High-Performance Data Infrastructure: Backend.AI integrates with the VAST DataStore, delivering high-throughput access to training datasets and model artifacts via NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS) and RDMA. This direct GPU-to-data pipeline removes I/O bottlenecks and ensures consistent performance across more than 500 NVIDIA GPUs on SK Telecom’s Sovereign AI cluster, accelerating model pre-training and fine-tuning at national scale.
• Unified Global Namespace for Seamless Collaboration: Backend.AI, built on VAST’s DASE architecture, provides researchers and developers with a single, unified namespace that spans every workload; from model training and validation to deployment. With VAST DataSpace, teams can instantly access checkpoints, datasets, and outputs across distributed environments without duplication or downtime, simplifying collaboration across the consortium.
• Secure, Multi-Tenant Scalability: Lablup leverages VAST DataEngine and DataSpace to unify data and compute management across shared GPU clusters. Tight integration between VAST’s quota model and Backend.AI’s user-based access controls ensures secure isolation between tenants while maintaining predictable performance for every user. This architecture allows Lablup to scale compute and storage independently while providing consistent service to government, academic, and enterprise researchers alike.
• Future-Ready for Inference and Agentic AI: As the Sovereign AI initiative transitions from development to deployment, Backend.AI’s integration with the VAST AI Operating System provides a foundation for inference and future agentic AI workloads. With VAST’s DataEngine enabling real-time orchestration and reasoning across massive datasets, Lablup’s customers can move beyond static model training toward dynamic, intelligent systems that continuously learn, adapt, and serve.

Within Lablup’s own infrastructure, the VAST AI Operating System supports AI infrastructure development, optimization testing, and model service orchestration. This integration allows engineers to test and deploy new AI models more efficiently, switching model weights in real time without downtime. Through joint engineering efforts, VAST and Lablup resolved early latency challenges, resulting in a stable, high-throughput system that scales seamlessly for both training and research operations.

Within the Korean Foundation Model Consortium, led by Upstage and supported by other national AI research partners, Backend.AI powered by the VAST AI Operating System processes massive-scale corpora for large-model pre-training and fine-tuning, advancing the development of frontier-grade, sovereign AI capabilities for Korea.

“Our work with Lablup shows what modern AI infrastructure actually looks like when it’s built for scale,” said Alon Horev, Co-Founder and CTO, VAST Data. “Legacy stacks that were never designed for GPU-dense or sovereign environments simply can’t keep up. By bringing compute orchestration and data intelligence together inside the VAST AI Operating System, we’ve created a single fabric that removes those bottlenecks and gives nations like Korea the ability to own, control, and accelerate their own AI innovation. It lets teams like Lablup train bigger, move faster, and stay in control of their data. With Backend.AI and VAST Data together, enterprises and researchers are establishing a new blueprint for high-performance AI infrastructure; one that fuses flexibility, efficiency, and trust for the agentic computing era.”

Led by the Ministry of Science and ICT, Korea’s Sovereign AI initiative aims to develop globally competitive foundation models built entirely with domestic technology, reducing dependence on foreign cloud and software providers. Together, VAST and Lablup provide the data and compute fabric that makes this possible, empowering start-ups, enterprises, and research institutions to train and scale AI securely within national borders. This collaboration reflects the growing technical synergy between Backend.AI’s distributed container orchestration and the VAST AI Operating System, a unified foundation for the agentic AI era.

About Lablup Lablup Inc. is redefining how modern AI systems are powered by delivering the operating model for scalable, high-performance GPU computing. Its flagship platform, Backend.AI, combines software-defined GPU virtualization, ultra-fast containerized environments, and intelligent workload orchestration to maximize performance, utilization, and efficiency across heterogeneous clusters.

Founded in 2015, Lablup works with global technology leaders, research institutions, and top universities to advance AI infrastructure and accelerate data-driven innovation worldwide. Learn more at lablup.com and follow Lablup on LinkedIn.

**About VAST Data ** VAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI. Learn more at vastdata.com and follow VAST Data on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.