Sui Foundation Invests $30 Million in DATA Network to Build an AI Training Data Pipeline

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• The Sui Foundation announced a $30 million investment in DATA Network on October 12, 2026, becoming the network’s largest institutional stakeholder
• DATA Network will be upgraded to run natively on Sui, retiring its independent chain, while its $DATA token carries over one-to-one, and Walrus becomes the default storage layer for its applications
• Trace, DATA Foundation’s onchain registry for rights-cleared AI training data launched in June 2026, has already recorded more than 250 million contributions and averages over 3 million receipts per day

The Sui Foundation said on October 12, 2026 that it is investing $30 million in DATA Network, a protocol built around supplying artificial intelligence developers with training data that has clear, trackable usage rights. The announcement, published jointly by the Sui and Walrus teams, frames the deal as part of a broader push to position Sui’s technology stack as the infrastructure layer where AI data gets stored, licensed and paid for.

As part of the deal, DATA Network will be upgraded to operate as a protocol native to Sui rather than running its own independent blockchain, with its $DATA token migrating over on a one-to-one basis once the transition is complete. The Sui Foundation’s $30 million stake is described as the largest institutional position in the network, though PIP Labs and DATA Foundation will continue holding their own stakes alongside it. SY Lee, who chairs Poseidon and serves as chief executive of PIP Labs, is joining the Sui Foundation as a strategic advisor as part of the arrangement.

At the center of DATA Network’s value proposition is Trace, an onchain registry launched by DATA Foundation in June 2026 that records where each piece of training data came from and what usage rights are attached to it, while also paying the original contributor. According to the announcement, Trace has already logged more than 250 million contributions and now processes an average of over 3 million receipts per day. Applications already writing data into the registry include Kled, which is in the process of onboarding more than 1.5 billion records, alongside smaller integrations named Numo and Oto.

Walrus, Sui’s decentralized storage network, is set to become the default storage layer for applications built on DATA Foundation’s infrastructure. Trace plans to store encrypted, immutable copies of original data files on Walrus so that any later processing or use of that data can be checked against the untouched original, giving AI labs a way to verify that a dataset has not been altered since it was first registered. Mysten Labs co-founder and chief product officer Adeniyi Abiodun said Sui and Walrus were “built to be the home where AI data is stored, licensed, and paid for,” while DATA Foundation chief executive Andrea Muttoni said ensuring data is “traceable, auditable and cleared to use is just as important for AI safety” as the quality of the data itself.

The announcement, published on Sui’s official blog, said the existing DATA Network chain will keep running until the upgrade to Sui is complete, and that a detailed timeline along with a plan for transitioning existing token holders will be published ahead of that migration, though no specific date for the cutover has yet been set.