VAST Data and TwelveLabs partner to expand video intelligence for the world’s largest and most secure video archives

At VAST Forward 2026, VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, and TwelveLabs, which develops video foundation models that enable advanced video intelligence, announced a partnership to help organisations see, hear and reason across massive video content archives and sensitive data environments beyond public cloud deployments. The collaboration introduces TwelveLabs’ first customer-managed deployment path on the VAST AI Operating System, which was built to manage unstructured data at exabyte scale, and now powers video search, analytics, and reasoning workflows where governance, sovereignty, and control are required.
 
Enterprises increasingly rely on valuable video assets across media archives, real-time smart-spaces, and public safety initiatives, but video remains difficult to operationalise at scale due to its size, complexity, and governance requirements. TwelveLabs’ models – already deployed across enterprise and government environments to power large-scale video understanding, include Marengo, designed for multimodal embeddings and search, and Pegasus, designed for deep video understanding and text generation. Together they enable teams to search, analyse, and extract insights from video using natural language and any-to-any search.
 
Through this partnership, VAST and TwelveLabs will support customer demand for deploying video intelligence closer to where video data is created and governed. The VAST AI Operating System will serve as the software foundation to unify video data for real-time processing and AI workflows across on-prem, cloud, and emerging neocloud environments, especially where public cloud-only deployments can be constrained by data sovereignty, regulatory requirements, security policies, and cost efficiency at scale.
 
“Our mission at TwelveLabs is to help machines understand video the way people do, across visuals, speech, sound and time – so teams can find what matters and extract insight from the moments that used to be unreachable,” said Danny Nicolopoulos, Head of Global Strategic Partnerships at TwelveLabs. “Partnering with VAST expands where customers can deploy video intelligence, including on-premises and emerging AI and neocloud environments, while supporting the performance and scale demanded by the world’s largest video archives. Together, we’re opening new possibilities for video search and analytics in industries where governance and data control are non-negotiable.”
 
By working with VAST, TwelveLabs will help customers operationalise AI pipelines without needing to stitch together fragmented systems, as the VAST AI OS delivers: 
 

• A unified global namespace: The VAST DataSpace offers access to massive video archives across hybrid multicloud environments, simplifying access, governance, and lifecycle management. 

 

• Built-in vector storage and retrieval: The VAST DataBase supports trillion-vector scale and real-time Similarity search – enabling large footprints common in video workloads (e.g., frame sampling, speech-to-text, and multimodal chunking).

 

• Real-time data and compute orchestration: The VAST DataEngine powers event-driven pipelines to generate, store, and act on embeddings and metadata as video data enters the system, without external orchestration sprawl.

 
VAST and TwelveLabs see growing demand across several industries. In media and entertainment, teams need to search and enrich massive content archives and production pipelines to accelerate discovery, reuse, and production workflows. In financial services, video intelligence can be applied to surveillance footage to support fraud detection and compliance programs. And in the public sector, agencies are working to operationalise video for faster investigation and situational awareness across multi-camera environments – particularly in deployments where data must remain on controlled infrastructure.
 
“Video is one of the most valuable sources of truth across both private and public sectors, and one of the hardest to operationalise at scale because the data is massive, long-lived, and often highly governed,” said John Mao, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances at VAST Data. “By partnering with TwelveLabs, we’re giving organisations a path to bring state-of-the-art video understanding to the data, not the other way around. With the VAST AI Operating System, customers can unify their video archives in a single global namespace and pair TwelveLabs’ models with a built-in, trillion-vector-scale foundation for embeddings and retrieval – so they can power search, analytics, and reasoning workflows with speed, governance, and control.”