Storage For The AI Tidal Wave
AI infrastructure is entering a new phase – one where the biggest challenge may no longer be building better models, but building systems capable of feeding them.
In this episode of Uplink, Michael Reid sits down with Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data, to explore the infrastructure realities behind the AI boom. From software-defined storage and GPU-scale architectures to neoclouds and agentic AI, this conversation dives deep into the systems powering the future of artificial intelligence.
Renen shares the long-term thinking that shaped VAST Data’s approach years before generative AI exploded into the mainstream, and explains why the traditional trade-offs between storage performance and capacity no longer work in the AI era.
The episode also explores how cloud competition is shifting, why new AI-native infrastructure providers are emerging, and what happens when thousands of AI agents begin operating like artificial workers that require orchestration, observability, and governance.
This episode covers:
⚫️ Why AI infrastructure bottlenecks are increasingly about data movement and power
⚫️ How software-defined storage changes scalability and efficiency for AI workloads
⚫️ Why decoupling software from hardware creates leverage during supply shortages
⚫️ The rise of neoclouds and AI-native infrastructure providers
⚫️ What modern training and inference environments require at GPU scale
⚫️ The future of agentic AI and large-scale orchestration of specialized agents
⚫️ How AI is reshaping cloud, storage, and connectivity infrastructure.
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Chapters:
00:00 Welcome From GTC And The Setup
03:24 The 2015 AI Bet On Data
06:12 Neoclouds And A Rebuilt Stack
11:05 Software That Breaks Hardware Limits
18:27 Power Space And Supply Bottlenecks
21:09 Enterprise AI And The Adoption Gap
31:54 Agentic AI And What Comes Next