AI storage platform company Vast Data has hired Glenn K. Lockwood, who left Microsoft last week.

A respected storage and supercomputing expert, Lockwood worked on Microsoft's AI cluster deployments.

At the time of his departure, Lockwood told DCD that he was taking "a six-figure pay cut in annual base pay" and giving up stock options for the role, leaving Microsoft partially due to rounds of mass layoffs impacting the company's culture.

At Vast, Lockwood has been named principal technical strategist. "The growth of AI is probably going to be a one-way street, and as it gets better, there will be more GPUs, more networks, more data centers, and more power," he said in Vast blog post.

"And even if AI stops getting better, society has only begun to scratch the surface of the ways in which it can improve productivity and the quality of life for people around the world."

He added: "Nobody designing AI infrastructure really knows what they’re doing; nobody knows what the ideal system for training or inferencing will look like in five years. The only certainty is that buying XYZ for the next five years solely because it worked for the last five years is not a big bet, and it will likely constrain the ways in which you can innovate."

Vast has grown massively with the AI boom, and moved deeper down the stack into data management and applications. After being valued at $9 billion in late 2023, it has been shopping for investors at a valuation of $25bn.