Cloud storage provider Backblaze has a 5-year, multi-exabyte, storage deal with Neocloud frontrunner CoreWeave worth $335 million.
CoreWeave has the main AI model developers, enterprises, and research organizations, as customers, including 9 of the top 10 AI model providers. Backblaze will provide HDD-based storage tiers in CoreWeave AI Object Storage. Customers already utilizing CoreWeave AI Object Storage with its patented LOTA distributed cache will immediately have access to new service tiers without any code modifications. Back in November, VAST Data landed a signed $1.17 billion deal with CoreWeave to supply storage and software for its AI Cloud infrastructure.
Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO at Backblaze, said: “Storage is the foundation every AI workflow is built on — without it, even the world’s most powerful compute sits idle. We’re pleased to work with CoreWeave on elements of their storage environment. This collaboration demonstrates how our platform can help organizations meet growing infrastructure demands.”
The Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage offering has more than 100,000 customers worldwide, with, now, four Neoclouds, non-hyperscaler public clouds focussed on GPU-as-a-Service, amongst them. B2 Neo is a purpose-built, white-label version of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage designed for neocloud operators.
Budman made a Neocloud observation in the company’s first fiscal 2027 earnings call: “Some Neoclouds have offered cloud storage built on Flash. It was fast and it worked. But as these platforms have scaled and AI workloads have grown, the economics have become increasingly difficult. Flash is now about 10 times more expensive per terabyte than hard drives. It works well for use cases requiring the lowest latency for smaller data sizes, but it becomes unsustainable at exabyte scale. As a result, Neoclouds are now actively looking to introduce a cost-efficient hard drive tier time patch to manage both performance and economics across their infrastructure.”
CoreWeave VP Nick Hoover said: “Backblaze has built a reputation for making complex, HDD-based storage infrastructure reliable and easy-to-consume at scale. We’re pleased to work with them as we continue expanding our platform and managed service offerings to support AI workloads at scale.”
VAST Data is the primary supplier of storage capacity to Neoclouds. We recently asked co-founder and CTO Alon Horev if now, with Neocloud customers storing many petabytes of data on VAST flash, there was a cost pressure to move old data into archives? He said not. Backblaze’s $335 million suggests he might have to revise that opinion.