Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in DATA Network under a strategic partnership that will migrate the AI training data protocol natively onto the Sui blockchain and retire its independent chain, DATA Foundation said in a Monday statement shared with The Block.

The deal makes Sui Foundation the network's largest institutional holder, joining existing stakeholders PIP Labs and DATA Foundation. As part of the arrangement, DATA Network's existing token will migrate to Sui on a one-to-one basis. The current DATA Network will keep operating until the transition finishes, and DATA Foundation said it will publish a detailed timeline before the upgrade.

The partnership also ties DATA Network into Walrus, the onchain data storage platform built within the Sui ecosystem. Walrus will become the default storage layer for applications operated by DATA Foundation, which refocused its mandate from general intellectual property infrastructure to AI training data in June.

What does the migration change operationally?

DATA Network stops running as a standalone chain and becomes a native protocol within the Sui stack. That shift consolidates the protocol's data-supply infrastructure on a single Layer 1, with storage handled by Walrus rather than bespoke tooling.

The core product is Trace, launched in June, which records the origins and usage rights of AI training data and settles payments to contributors. According to DATA Foundation, the Trace registry has logged more than 250 million contributions since launch and now processes an average of more than 3 million receipts per day.

The foundation frames the upgrade as giving AI laboratories a compliant venue for sourcing real-world training data, at a moment when regulators are tightening consent and provenance requirements around the datasets used to train models.

How large is the usage footprint?

The disclosed metrics point to substantial throughput for a protocol only months past its June launch:

• More than 250 million contributions recorded in the Trace registry since launch
• More than 3 million receipts processed per day on average
• DATA token migration to Sui at a one-to-one ratio

What did the parties say?

Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs — the original contributor to Sui and Walrus — tied the deal to the exhaustion of openly available web data as a training resource.

"The AI industry has reached the point where the open internet has been read, and the next frontier is defined by access to datasets with the consent and provenance that regulators require," Abiodun said.

"The migration of DATA Network and Trace to our stack now brings massive volumes of high-quality, rights-cleared data that is already serving the world's frontier AI labs," he added.

For Sui, the arrangement deepens its positioning in AI-related infrastructure, pairing Walrus storage with a provenance and payments layer already generating transaction volume. For DATA Network, it trades the operational burden of maintaining an independent chain for integration into a larger institutional ecosystem backed by its largest holder.

The exact mechanics of the token swap and chain retirement will become clear when DATA Foundation releases its transition timeline ahead of the upgrade.