Cloud storage firm Storj has acquired Valdi’s high performance and on-demand compute platform, in the hopes of using it for its customers’ AI workloads.
Valdi aims to address the big shortage of GPUs driven by the growth of the AI market, by making them available “instantly” in the cloud. With its acquisition, Storj says it is delivering a full stack distributed cloud solution with integrated storage and GPU availability.
Storj enables customers to use underutilized storage capacity in datacenters across over 100 countries, and Valdi allows customers to use available GPU compute cycles in datacenters globally too.
“The combination is ideal because most AI workloads require significant GPU compute, storage and movement of large data sets,” said Storj.
Valdi claims this makes it easy to spin up GPU clusters in flexible configurations in “only a few seconds,” and claims it does this with no contracts, and at “very reasonable pricing”. The Valdi network features over 16,000 GPUs globally. Institutions including CalTech and USC/ISI use Valdi’s platform for their AI workloads.
Ben Golub, Storj CEO, said: “Storj today builds on its strong foundation of distributed cloud object storage. Acquiring Valdi expands the value of our distributed solutions for the enterprise, by enabling a full stack cloud offering for our wide range of global customers.”
Storj says it reduces cloud costs by up to 90 percent when compared to traditional cloud providers, and that it also cuts carbon emissions by using existing, unused hard drive capacity. Storj and Valdi, along with Ad Signal, co-founded the non-profit Digital Sustainability Alliance (DSA), to advocate for sustainable data processing technology.
“Our customers have substantial storage needs for their AI workloads, so uniting our organizations delivers benefits to customers while empowering us to grow faster,” said Valdi CEO Nikhil Jain.
The value of the acquisition has not been disclosed. Valdi was founded by Adam Zheng and Jain in 2022, and received early-stage venture capital investment in November 2023. The primary investor was FMS Capital Partners, which took a minority stake in Valdi.
Last October, Storj claimed its revenue was growing 226 percent year-on-year, with customers and partners including Toysmith, Acronis, Ad Signal, Valdi, Cribl, Livepeer, Bytenite, Cloudvice, Amove, and Kubecost helping to generate that growth.
