DATA Network joins Sui and Walrus to scale the supply chain for AI training data

[PRESS RELEASE – Palo Alto, United States, October 12th, 2026] Trace, the onchain registry for rights-cleared AI training data with more than 250 million verifiable receipts, brings its training data to Sui and Walrus to power the next generation of AI models. >Sui Foundation and The >DATA Foundation today announced that the DATA Network and its >Trace registry are joining the Sui stack, bringing a live supply of rights-cleared AI training data onto the infrastructure Sui has built for AI workloads. >Walrus, the data platform with integrity proofs anchored on Sui, becomes the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation. Separately, the DATA Network will be upgraded to run as a protocol natively on Sui. The upgrade gives AI labs a single place to source real-world training data they are allowed to use, with its provenance recorded by Trace and the original file stored and access-controlled on Walrus. The next generation of AI models is constrained by access to real-world data. The open internet has been scraped, and the data that comes next must be sourced from people, with consent and with provenance that regulators and legal teams will accept. The EU AI Act and ongoing litigation over training data have made provenance a procurement requirement for labs. The data those models need sits with people rather than on the open web: a nurse describing a patient’s night in her own words, a dashcam recording of a rainy commute in Jakarta, a factory technician’s hands as they diagnose a fault, or a customer call conducted in Bengali. It is personal and often regulated, and it belongs to the people who generated it. Trace, launched by DATA Foundation in June as an onchain registry for AI training data, was built for exactly this kind of data. It records the origin of each contribution and the rights attached to it, and settles payment to the person who contributed it. It has registered more than 250 million contributions since launch and now processes over 3M receipts per day on average. Applications writing to Trace include Kled, the largest opt-in human data marketplace with over 1.5 billion records being onboarded, along with Numo and Oto, applications that already license data to frontier AI labs and robotics companies. Sui represents every asset as a programmable object, allowing datasets and their licenses to be managed onchain like tokens. Independent transactions execute in parallel and settle in under a second, making the network capable of handling millions of daily registrations. Walrus extends this capability to large files: it stores massive AI datasets efficiently and en