From Cloud to Cosmos: Jason Vallery on Building the Next Generation of AI Infrastructure

On today’s episode of the Shared Everything podcast, Nicole talks to Jason Vallery, who just joined VAST after a 13-year career at Microsoft where he helped build the Azure cloud from the ground up. Jason reflects on the early days of object storage and cloud-native computing, when scaling from petabytes to exabytes redefined what infrastructure meant, and explains how lessons from Azure’s hyperscale era now shape his vision for VAST’s role in the AI age. He talks about the convergence of file and object systems, the evolution of AI storage built for thousands of GPUs, and the industry’s pivot from “data gravity” to a world where compute follows power and data must follow compute. Together, they trace how public cloud principles birthed the AI supercomputers of today and how the next wave of disaggregated, multi-cloud “neo clouds” will demand architectures that look a lot like what VAST is building