Black billionaire Robert F. Smith launches world's first enterprise AI inference cloud backed by $3.5 billion

Robert F. Smith has taken his longest step yet from software investor to AI infrastructure builder.

Vista Equity Partners and early-stage venture capital firm Cambium Capital launched Vector Core Compute on June 3 at Intel's Computex keynote in Taipei, unveiling what the companies are calling the world's first commercially available enterprise inference cloud for disaggregated AI workloads. The platform, known as VC2, went live the same day from a facility in Los Angeles.

The infrastructure behind VC2 pulls together three hardware types that typically run in silos. Intel Xeon CPUs handle orchestration and execution. SambaNova SN40 Reconfigurable Dataflow Units handle decode workloads. Nvidia Blackwell GPUs process prefill tasks. The architecture is designed around how agentic AI actually works in practice: as a sequence of distinct computational steps, each with different performance demands, that need to be routed to the right hardware at the right cost.

Vista and Cambium are backing the platform with a $3.5 billion compute commitment to SambaNova and additional support from Intel. Beyond the Los Angeles launch facility, sites are in development in Chicago, Seattle and Phoenix, with plans for more than 50 US metro locations. International expansion is planned, with locations to be guided by strategic partners and customer demand.

Smith has spent much of 2026 arguing that the real value in the AI cycle will not accrue to the builders of the largest models or the owners of the largest data centers. It will flow to the enterprise software companies deploying AI directly into business workflows, and the infrastructure that makes that deployment economically viable.

VC2 is that argument made physical. More than half of Vista's 90-plus portfolio companies have already converted to agentic AI solutions, Smith said at the Computex launch. "The constraint is no longer the model," he said. "It is access to the infrastructure that makes it economically viable to run at scale."

Smith's net worth stands at approximately $11.1 billion. Vista manages more than $107 billion in assets under management and invests exclusively in enterprise software businesses, making it one of the most concentrated bets in the industry on the premise that software, not hardware, captures the long-term value of the AI transition.