CoreWeave, the mammoth GPU-as-a-Service supplier, has listed Backblaze as a store for its customers’ data.
Cloud storage supplier Backblaze has a strategic partnership with CoreWeave and can deliver a cost saving over Amazon S3, which is used as a store for CoreWeave customers’ data. Backblaze, with $24.6 million in revenues last quarter, is a financial sprat in comparison to CoreWeave, which raised $421 million in a B-round last April, another $200 million in May, plus $2.3 billion debt financing in August.
Our thinking is that AI is expensive. This partnership enables AI developers to save cash by not buying on-premises equipment and not using big 3 public cloud object storage resources.
CoreWeave states that automatic volume backups are supported using Backblaze via CoreWeave’s application catalog.
It suggests customers should use Backblaze to store the data needed to fuel AI models running on CoreWeave GPUs and can put the money saved towards their overall AI costs.
Backblaze bases its storage facilities on pods of disk drives, its own design of storage enclosures, with closely watched drive failure rates and high reliability software schemes to keep data safe. It used more than 241,000 disk drives as of August 2023 and stores many petabytes of customer data.
CoreWeave announced a deal with VAST Data to use its all-flash storage for customers’ real-time and nearline storage needs in its datacenters last month. Backblaze now has a new marketing/selling angle – providing long-term cloud storage for VAST customers.
Comment
This is a terrific boost for Backblaze, which is now swimming alongside cloud storage whales and has received a leg-up. We can expect the amount of data stored by CoreWeave customers to rise substantially over the next few quarters with Backblaze capacity used rising in lockstep.
