AI 3D company VAST has closed its Series B and Series B+ rounds, raising about 300 million yuan in total, with Jingwei Venture Capital leading the deal. Strategic investors including Perfect World, BlueFocus, ThunderSoft and 37 Interactive Entertainment also joined, while existing backers such as Dachen Capital, Primavera Capital and 4399 added more capital. VAST did not disclose a valuation in this round. The company has moved quickly through successive financings this year. It completed a $50 million Series A in March, followed by Series A+ and A++ rounds in June that raised nearly $200 million, and a Series A3 round in July that brought in more than 1 billion yuan. Based on the publicly disclosed amounts, VAST’s total financing has now approached 6 billion yuan. The broader AI 3D market has also drawn attention, with direct rival Meshy raising nearly $400 million in a July Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Elon Musk backed a claim on X that memory, rather than raw compute, is the real rate-limiting factor in the age of AI agents, replying that 「Few realize this.」 The point is one he has made repeatedly this year. According to the source material, Musk raised the issue at Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call on April 22, echoed complaints about memory price inflation in late June, and then gave a sharper figure at SpaceX’s Q2 earnings call in early August: memory capacity is growing about 20% a year, while demand is rising 200% or more. The report ties that view to a broader shift in AI infrastructure. As agentic systems hold much larger context windows and persistent task histories, KV cache becomes a bigger memory burden. With HBM still expensive and tight in supply, companies are moving more context data down the memory stack into NAND and storage. NVIDIA’s Inference Context Memory Storage Platform, introduced at CES, is cited as one example, using Dynamo and NIXL to place KV cache on NVMe SSDs. The same report also tracks how markets are reading the memory cycle. Korean brokerages cut target prices for Samsung Electronics and SK hynix on concerns that the conventional memory upcycle may have peaked, while Sandisk later issued long-term revenue growth guidance that helped memory shares rebound across Asia.

IOSG argues that the current storage rally is being driven by artificial intelligence, but not in the way traditional IT buyers used to think about storage. In its view, the market is no longer rewarding raw capacity first. It is rewarding the ability to keep GPUs fed, move checkpoints quickly, support retrieval-augmented generation with very low latency, and raise overall compute utilization across tightly coupled infrastructure stacks. That shift, the article says, is why components such as HBM, DRAM, CXL, enterprise SSDs, SSD controllers, NVMe pathways, and performance storage software have become central to the AI investment narrative. The piece draws a sharp distinction between AI storage and decentralized storage. AI storage is framed as an efficiency system built for hot data and commercial output. Decentralized storage, by contrast, is described as a trust system for cold data, focused on permanence, censorship resistance, auditability, and public memory. IOSG uses Filecoin and Arweave as the main examples, outlining how the two networks diverge in architecture and product direction, while also listing persistent problems across the sector, including weak enterprise service layers, retrieval limits, supply-demand incentive mismatches, privacy and compliance tensions, and token economics that can amplify market cycles rather than solve product-market fit.

VAST, a Chinese AI 3D modeling startup backed by Alibaba and Baidu, is weighing a Hong Kong initial public offering, according to Bloomberg. The company has discussed a potential share sale with Bank of America Corp and China International Capital Corp. The move comes shortly after VAST announced a new funding round of nearly $200 million in June, a deal that reportedly lifted its valuation to about $1 billion and pushed it into the ranks of China’s newest AI unicorns. Bloomberg said the round was led by Ince Capital, with Primavera Capital and existing investor Jingya Capital also participating. Founded in Beijing in 2023 by Song Yachen, a former member of the founding team at large language model developer MiniMax, VAST is known for its AI 3D generation platform Tripo Studio. The product lets users create textured and detailed 3D models from text prompts or uploaded photos, with export options for major game engines and design software. The company says it has about 20 million users worldwide, with the United States as its largest market, followed by Europe, Japan, and South Korea. VAST has also worked with NetEase on the role-playing game Where Winds Meet and has project collaborations with Sony and other companies.

VAST Data is reportedly discussing a new funding round that could raise about $5 billion and value the AI infrastructure firm at up to $30 billion, with Nvidia and Alphabet’s CapitalG among potential investors.

VAST Data is reportedly discussing a new funding round with CapitalG and Nvidia that could raise about $5 billion and value the AI infrastructure startup at up to $30 billion, underscoring strong investor appetite for AI data center and storage plays.

AI infrastructure startup VAST Data is reportedly in advanced talks with Nvidia and Alphabet's CapitalG for a multi-billion dollar funding round that could value the company at up to $30 billion. The firm has reached $200M ARR and aims to triple that, fueling IPO speculation.

AI infrastructure startup VAST Data is in talks for a $5B funding round at a potential $30B valuation, with Google CapitalG and Nvidia participating. The company reports $200M ARR and positive free cash flow, fueling IPO speculation.