Overview
- Backblaze and CoreWeave announced Tuesday a five‑year, $335 million multi‑exabyte storage agreement that runs through about 2031 and commits Backblaze to supply large‑scale capacity for portions of CoreWeave’s managed storage.
- The technical integration will place Backblaze HDD‑based tiers inside CoreWeave AI Object Storage so cold and bulk AI data can live on cheaper drives while hot data stays on faster media reserved for training and inference.
- CoreWeave customers using its patented LOTA distributed cache will get immediate access to new lower‑cost HDD‑backed tiers with no code changes required, according to the companies.
- Markets reacted strongly: Backblaze shares rose roughly 20% intraday on the announcement before trimming gains later in the session, while CoreWeave stock fell about 5.65% the same day.
- The deal gives Backblaze a predictable revenue stream but also concentrates customer exposure because annualized payments could represent a material share of Backblaze’s current run rate; the partnership reflects a wider industry shift toward tiered storage to manage rapidly growing AI data volumes.