BUSINESS TECH | Hyundai Motor, Kia invest in VAST Data for AI infrastructure
The unified infrastructure supports model training and deployment as 42dot standardizes its AI data structure and develops a Data Flywheel system, according to the announcement.
Hyundai Motor Company and Kia have invested in VAST Data to support the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure for autonomous driving and robotics, deepening an existing partnership built around the South Korean automakers’ production AI workloads.
Announced Oct. 15, 2026, the strategic investment follows years of production use of VAST Data’s AI Operating System by 42dot, Hyundai Motor and Kia’s autonomous mobility division and global software center.
42dot uses the platform for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) research and autonomous driving workloads. The companies said consolidating ADAS and large language model development onto a common data platform has helped reduce data fragmentation and duplicated work as the programs expand.
Before adopting VAST Data, the automakers’ ADAS and language model programs relied on separate platforms from different vendors. 42dot consolidated the workloads on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system powered by NVIDIA Hopper and built on VAST Data’s platform.
The unified infrastructure supports model training and deployment as 42dot standardizes its AI data structure and develops a Data Flywheel system, according to the announcement.
VAST Data said the production environment achieved a 2-to-1 data reduction rate on sensor and video data, helping 42dot expand capacity within existing data center space and power constraints.
The platform supports multiple data protocols, including S3 and Network File System (NFS), allowing simulation, training and validation pipelines to access data through a shared namespace without maintaining separate copies. It also replicates AI datasets across 42dot’s data center sites.
Hokeun Chung, executive vice president of Hyundai Motor and Kia’s Future Strategy Division, said the partnership began with the automakers as customers before they decided to invest.
“Our journey with VAST started as a customer,” Chung said. “Consolidating our ADAS and language model development onto one platform changed how quickly our teams can move from data collection to a validated model.”
He said autonomous driving and robotics require infrastructure capable of processing growing volumes of vehicle-generated data reliably and quickly.
Autonomous vehicles generate large amounts of information through cameras, lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors. Processing these datasets for simulation, model training and validation places different demands on storage performance, latency and data governance.
VAST Data’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything architecture is designed to support these workloads by reducing data fragmentation and input/output bottlenecks in conventional high-performance computing file systems, the company said.
Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data, said the investment reflects the automakers’ confidence in the platform following its use in production.
Hyundai Motor and Kia’s investment adds to VAST Data’s investor base. The company closed a Series F financing round at a $30 billion valuation in April 2026, with participation from Fidelity Management & Research Co., New Enterprise Associates and NVIDIA.
The companies did not disclose the size of the investment or provide financial terms.
