January & February 2026 Product Updates

Welcome back to another round of updates at Vast.ai. We've kicked off the new year with improvements focused on expanding orchestration support, refining billing and serverless workflows, and introducing new templates and guides to help you deploy faster and more securely.

Another exciting update: we recently launched the Vast.ai Startup Program, designed to support early-stage teams building on our platform.

Startups can now get up to $2,500 in free GPU credits when they move their workloads to Vast.ai. With 24/7 priority support and access to Vast's full range of GPUs, the program delivers high-performance compute to power the next wave of AI innovation without long-term commitments. For more info, see our blog post here.

Not to mention we have a comprehensive new Model Library, giving you a faster path from model selection to deployment.

NVIDIA Cloud GPU Updates

SkyPilot Enhancements

For teams using SkyPilot to manage deployments, we've made updates that expand configuration options on Vast.ai. SkyPilot users can now filter capacity by Secure Cloud to ensure that workloads run only on verified datacenter-hosted GPUs.

We've also added full support for instance creation parameters via SkyPilot, enabling precise control over images, environment variables, disk size, pricing, startup commands, and other instance-level settings at launch. See SkyPilot docs for full details.

Fresh New Templates and Guides

Our Model Library introduces a model-first approach to deploying AI. Templates are organized by modality and use case and include recommended hardware presets and clear dedicated GPU pricing.

Here are some of our newest templates:

• Kimi K2.5 - An open-source, native multimodal agentic model that combines vision and language understanding with agentic capabilities.
• LTX-2 - A DiT-based audio-video generation model that produces synchronized video and sound.
• SGLang - A high-performance LLM inference framework with a hosted API server template.

And our latest guides:

• dstack + vLLM: Deploy language models using vLLM with dstack for automated provisioning and cost control.
• DR-Tulu: Deploy a research agent trained with an MCP server and web tools.
• GLiNER2: Run GLiNER2 for named entity recognition with custom entity types.
• BrowseSafe: Deploy BrowseSafe to detect prompt injection attacks in HTML.
• Overnight Ralph Loop: Budget-friendly alternative workflow to Claude Code.

Other Improvements

If you missed it late last year, we also launched Vast.ai Serverless. It enables automatic, pay-per-use scaling for AI workloads through a fully serverless API on Vast's globally distributed GPU cloud.

Our Commitment

With new SkyPilot enhancements, startup opportunities, a model-first deployment experience, and improved inference workflows, we're continuing to build a platform that gives you more control with less friction.

Need help? Contact our customer support team anytime at support@vast.ai or join our Discord server for tips, real-time updates, and ongoing community discussion.

Change Log

SkyPilot Enhancements

• Advanced configuration options for SkyPilot on Vast.ai.
• Support for filtering by Secure Cloud (datacenter_only).
• Full support for instance creation parameters via SkyPilot.
• See SkyPilot docs.

New Templates

• Kimi K2.5: Multimodal agentic model.
• LTX-2: Video and audio generation model.
• SGLang: High-performance LLM inference engine.
• Find them in the Model Library.

Template Updates

• Base Image and PyTorch now support CUDA 13.1 and updated NVML libraries.
• Ostris AI Toolkit updates.
• ComfyUI updates.
• Llama.cpp (ssl) updates.
• SGLang onstart script fix.
• Pinokio v6.x updates.

New Guides

• dstack: Serving infrastructure.
• DR-Tulu: MCP.
• GLiNER2: Named Entity Recognition.
• BrowseSafe: AI agents and security.
• Overnight Ralph Loop: Budget-friendly alternative to Claude Code.

Platform Improvements

• Fixed serverless GPU filter UI.
• Fixed serverless template selection UI.
• Billing Transaction History Invoice PDF Export now excludes failed and pending payments and other non-payment activity.
• Billing Transaction History now supports easy individual invoice download.
• Security improvements.
• Local volume deletion issue resolved.
• Copy progress bar issue resolved.
• Disk quota issues resolved.
• Machines missing geolocation resolved.
• Host CLI schedule maintenance command issue resolved.