# Storage news ticker - 17 July > Source: > Published: 2026-07-17 18:18:51+00:00 # Storage news ticker - 17 July **Databricks**, announced strategic funding at a $188 billion valuation, with a signed a term sheet for the round, which it expects to close later this summer, led by existing investor Coatue. The round will include additional new and existing investors. Databricks will use the undisclosed amount of new capital to accelerate its AI strategy, doubling down on Unity AI Gateway, its multi-AI governance solution, Genie, Databricks' AI coworker that turns business data into trusted answers and actions, and [Lakebase](https://www.databricks.com/product/lakebase), its serverless Postgres database built for AI agents. This capital is also expected to support future AI acquisitions and deepen AI research. “Enterprises are moving from tokenmaxxing to valuemaxxing. They don't want to burn expensive tokens on the smartest model for every task — they want the best outcome per dollar. That means having the freedom to choose the right AI for the job,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “This new capital lets us keep pushing our multi-AI strategy forward to meet massive customer demand, so we can keep strengthening Unity AI Gateway, expanding Genie, and advancing Lakebase.” … **Databricks** has published a new blog [ Benchmarking Coding Agents on Databricks’ Multi-Million Line Codebase | Databricks Blog](https://www.databricks.com/blog/benchmarking-coding-agents-databricks-multi-million-line-codebase). The blog explains how Databricks evaluates different models and coding harnesses on real engineering work, revealing that a mix of OpenAI, Anthropic and open-source models deliver the strongest performance, while also challenging assumptions about cost, efficiency and model selection. The results showed clear clustering of the models and harnesses into 3 capability tiers. Read the blog for more information. … **Databricks** has appointed Lee Stockwell as its new Head of Public Sector for the UK and Ireland. … **Datadog** has expanded its UK Data Hosting Capabilities with the launch of its products and services on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Europe (London) Region. The move is particularly relevant for regulated sectors, like financial services, healthcare, government and higher education, where in-region data residency and operational continuity are critical. … **DDN** has appointed Michelle Rosen as Chief Legal Officer as the company enters its next phase of global growth in AI infrastructure across enterprise AI, sovereign AI, cloud service providers and hyperscale deployments. Over the past six months, the company has expanded its global presence, surpassed one million GPUs deployed worldwide, introduced major innovations across its AI data intelligence platform, and is delivering more than 300% year-over-year growth as organizations around the world accelerate investments in AI infrastructure. … Storage Review [reports](https://www.storagereview.com/news/supermicros-edge-ai-appliances-drop-the-per-site-storage-array-with-portworx-and-openshift) that Supermicro has introduced Kubernetes Edge AI Appliances, developed in partnership with Red Hat and **Everpure.** The pre-integrated systems combine Supermicro edge servers, Red Hat OpenShift, and the Portworx by Everpure Kubernetes data management platform to support AI inference, containers, and virtual machines across distributed sites. The offering is positioned as a validated, software-preloaded deployment model for organizations that need to standardize AI infrastructure outside the data center. Portworx by Everpure provides Kubernetes-native storage and data management. Rather than requiring a dedicated storage array at every site, the software aggregates local storage within Supermicro’s edge servers into a software-defined platform. Supermicro says the design supports autonomous operation during network interruptions, with high availability, data protection, and consistent storage policies maintained locally. The company is also positioning the platform for environments that require repeatable deployment and centralized operations across hundreds or thousands of sites. … **ExaGrid** CEO Bill Andrews was asked in a Storage Newsletter [article](https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2026/07/15/exclusive-interview-with-bill-andrews-ceo-exagrid/); “You introduced full flash appliances, how have they been received from your partners and end-users?” He replied: “At first they were well received but then SSD components prices in the industry have skyrocketed, putting Flash/SSD out of reach for backup workloads.” We imagine the same us true for other all-flash backup appliances. … **Liqid**, which supplies software-defined memory and GPU pooling infrastructure, announced the appointment of Daniel Berg as Chief Product Officer. He joins Liqid with more than three decades of product and engineering leadership, including executive roles at Gorilla Logic, JumpCloud, NetApp, Skype, and Sun Microsystems. He will own product management, strategy and engineering for Liqid's entire product portfolio including Liqid Matrix® and the company’s software-defined memory and GPU pooling infrastructure. … Data integrity supplier **Precisely** appointed Vinesh Vis as CRO and Jane Gilson as chief business officer (CBO), reporting directly to CEO Walid Abu-Hadba. Vis joins Precisely from Smarsh, where he served as chief revenue officer and general manager. Prior to this, he led revenue organisations across both high-growth private technology companies and large-scale public organisations, including Oracle. Gilson will lead Precisely's global commercial business, including channel and ecosystems, professional and strategic services, revenue operations, deal desk governance, and GTM strategy. Gilson brings more than two decades of experience leading growth and transformation initiatives at global technology companies, including executive leadership roles at Microsoft, Google, and as CEO at CloudSphere. … Citrini analyst Jukan [posts](https://x.com/jukan05/status/2076931400541081899) that **Samsung** Electronics is exploring a potential offering of American depositary receipts, and has held preliminary discussions with banks. It would mean following competitor SK Hynix’ lead. … An X -[post]( https://x.com/markflowchatter/status/2076444715596087425) quotes a Goldman Sachs report discussing **Sandisk’s** “recently signed New Business Model (NBM) agreements. Our updated model reflects committed revenues from five total NBMs: three signed in FQ3 totaling ~$42B of RPO, and two additional deals signed early in FQ4 with no disclosed RPO balance yet. We estimate all five deals represent ~$62B of minimum committed revenue over the next several years, with >$11B of financial guarantees/prepayments that provide better visibility than SNDK has had before.” … Wcctech [reports ](https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-ceo-warns-2027-memory-worst-year-ever-shortages-set-to-outlast-the-decade/)that **SK Hynix **CEO Kwak Noh-jung stated that the memory industry will see its "worst-ever" supply shortages in the coming year (2027). SK Hynix has also forecasted that, given the current market demand, they will fall way short of fulfilling the market demand, and that will continue beyond 2030.” This was said as SK Hynix celebrated its [trading debut on Nasdaq](https://news.skhynix.com/celebrating-adr-trading/) in Times Square. … **TrendForce's** recent memory pricing survey shows that more mature NAND process capacity is being shifted toward higher-value products like high-layer-count 3D NAND, leading to a significant shortage of MLC NAND supply. As a result, some industrial, automotive, and networking clients are considering switching to SLC NAND, further tightening the already limited market. Demand for SLC NAND continues to grow in AI edge computing, data centers, and automotive electronics, causing the supply-demand gap to widen quickly. TrendForce predicts SLC NAND contract prices will rise by 120–170% in the second half of 2026 compared to the first half, with potential for even greater increases. … **WEKA** says Neocloud leader CoreWeave has been a customer for a while. WEKA customer Cohere [runs](https://www.weka.io/news/weka-introduces-neuralmesh-axonhttps://www.weka.io/news/weka-introduces-neuralmesh-axon) NeuralMesh Axon on CoreWeave. WEKA ran some of its first production-scale benchmark testing of Augmented Memory Grid on CoreWeave. [See blog here](https://www.weka.io/article/agents-at-scale-escaping-upside-down-tokenomics-with-up-to-4-2x-efficiency). … **ZeroPoint Technologies** [announced](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/zeropoint-technologies-announces-zerostream-302826416.html) ZeroStream, new hardware compression IP that increases effective memory bandwidth and lets chip designers do more with the same memory. Key features include: ZeroStream works across a variety of use cases, including delivering more tokens per second from AI accelerators. Lossless compression with no quantization or accuracy loss. Up to 1.5x compression on LLM weights, 2x average improvement on activations and KV cache. 20-35% effective bandwidth improvement, up to 50 percent for some workloads.