Hyundai Motor Company and Kia (HKMC) have made a strategic investment in VAST Data, the AI infrastructure company whose platform already underpins HKMC’s self-driving and robotics work.

The investment deepens a relationship that goes back several years. 42dot, HKMC’s autonomous mobility division, runs its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) research and autonomous driving workloads on the VAST AI Operating System in production. Before standardising on VAST, HKMC’s ADAS and large language model programmes sat on separate platforms from different vendors, which fragmented data and duplicated effort as both scaled. 42dot has since consolidated both onto an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on VAST.

Consolidation halved its storage footprint

HKMC said the setup has delivered a 2:1 data reduction rate against real sensor and video data, giving 42dot enough footprint and power efficiency to expand capacity without building or renting additional data centre space. VAST’s multiprotocol support also lets simulation, training and validation pipelines work off the same data without duplicating it.

Autonomous vehicle development is one of the most data-heavy workloads in enterprise AI today. A single sensor-equipped test vehicle can generate terabytes of data a day across cameras, LiDAR, radar and ultrasonic sensors, which adds up to hundreds of petabytes across a global test fleet.

“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,” said Hokeun Chung, HKMC’s executive vice president for its Future Strategy Division. “This investment reflects our confidence, earned in production, that VAST is the right long-term partner for that scale.”

Renen Hallak, founder and chief executive of VAST Data, said HKMC’s move from customer to investor reflects how physical AI applications such as vehicles and robots are running into the same data bottlenecks enterprises hit years earlier, just at a much larger scale.

The investment adds to VAST Data’s roster of strategic backers. The company closed a Series F round at a US$30 billion valuation in April 2026, with investors including NVIDIA, Fidelity Management & Research Company and NEA.