Hyundai Motor Company and Kia have made a strategic investment in data infrastructure company VAST Data, expanding a relationship that the companies say has supported advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and robotics AI development.
According to VAST Data, Hyundai Motor Company and Kia’s autonomous mobility division, 42dot, has been running ADAS research and autonomous driving workloads on the VAST AI Operating System in production. VAST said 42dot consolidated ADAS and large language model development onto a single platform using an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on VAST, after previously using multiple vendor platforms.
VAST said the consolidation delivered a 2:1 data reduction rate on sensor and video data, and improved footprint and power efficiency, allowing capacity expansion within existing data centre constraints rather than requiring new facilities. The company also said its platform supports multiple protocols, including S3 and NFS, and replicates AI datasets across 42dot data centre sites.
The investment comes as autonomous vehicle software development increases demand for high-throughput storage and data management. VAST noted that a single sensor-equipped test vehicle can generate terabytes of data per day from cameras, LiDAR, radar and ultrasonic sensors, and that scaling across fleets can push data holdings into the hundreds of petabytes. It said these workloads require a mix of throughput, latency and governance capabilities on a single underlying platform.
“Our journey with VAST started as a customer,” said Executive Vice President Hokeun Chung of HKMC’s Future Strategy Division. “Consolidating our ADAS and language model development onto one platform changed how quickly our teams can move from data collection to a validated model. Our work in autonomous driving and robotics depends on being able to use the data our vehicles generate quickly and reliably, and as data volumes grow it requires infrastructure that can keep pace. This investment reflects our confidence, earned in production, that VAST is the right long-term partner for that scale.”
“The companies building physical AI such as vehicles, robots and machines, are running into the same data problem enterprises hit years ago, and at a much larger scale. We remain committed to breaking decades-old trade-offs to deliver the data infrastructure stack for AI. HKMC’s decision to invest in VAST, having already seen the benefits of our technology, shows that our infrastructure is core to their future and capable of meeting the increasing needs of AI,” said Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data.
VAST Data said it closed its Series F financing in April 2026 at a US$30 billion valuation, with participation from investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company, NEA and NVIDIA.
