In this interview from VAST Forward 2026 in Salt Lake City, Chen Goldberg, executive vice president of product and engineering at CoreWeave, joins theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight to discuss the evolution from "Cloud 1.0" to the purpose-built AI cloud. Goldberg, a founding member of the Kubernetes project, explains why the traditional hyperscaler model requires a fundamental rethink to meet the extreme performance demands of modern AI workloads. She highlights how CoreWeave is prioritizing observability and transparency across the entire stack – from compute to storage – to ensure resiliency and efficiency for large-scale training and inference. The conversation also explores how CoreWeave’s engineering-led partnership with VAST Data is enabling high-throughput solutions, such as distributed caching mechanisms that optimize data delivery to GPUs. Goldberg delves into the democratization of AI, noting how enterprises in healthcare and finance are moving beyond experimentation to deploy production-ready applications via managed APIs. From the acquisition of Weights & Biases to the critical balance of accuracy, price and latency in inference, she provides a roadmap for how organizations can leverage specialized infrastructure to accelerate innovation and overcome the technical debt of legacy cloud environments.