Ray Data, a scalable data processing framework, has experienced significant growth and adoption since its general availability announcement, driven by evolving demands for handling multimodal data and large AI models. The platform has expanded its capabilities to support high-dimensional datasets such as images and embeddings, requiring specialized formats and inference engines, and has improved structured data operations through enhanced DataFrame APIs and optimized functions like projection and predicate pushdown. Recent updates include features for efficient multimodal data processing, such as improved tensor handling and direct MCAP file reading, as well as enhancements for large model support, including cross-node model parallelism and compatibility with various accelerators. Ray Data 2.51 also introduced new APIs that facilitate vectorized transformations, improving the efficiency of wide operations like joins and shuffles, and optimized parquet reading performance. These developments aim to meet the needs of growing data and AI workloads, emphasizing performance, reliability, and scalability.