Backblaze Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) posted a sharp share gain of 20% on Tuesday after announcing a five-year, $335 million storage agreement with CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV).
The contract, described by both companies as multi-exabyte in scale, assigns Backblaze to provide storage capacity that will back parts of CoreWeave's managed storage infrastructure. The technology will underpin HDD-based tiers within CoreWeave AI Object Storage, with the stated purpose of improving data placement across performance levels while conserving higher-performance storage resources for active AI workloads.
According to the announcement, customers using CoreWeave AI Object Storage together with its LOTA distributed cache will be able to access the newly integrated service tiers without modifying application code. The storage setup is intended to support a range of AI workflow stages, including training, inference, checkpointing, data preparation, model output storage, and retrieval-augmented generation.
"Storage is the foundation every AI workflow is built on - without it, even the worlds most powerful compute sits idle," said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze. "Were pleased to work with CoreWeave on elements of their storage environment. This collaboration demonstrates how our platform can help organizations meet growing infrastructure demands."
Backblaze describes itself as serving more than 100,000 customers worldwide and operating large-scale storage infrastructure intended to deliver storage services for enterprise and data-intensive use cases.
Nick Hoover, Vice President at CoreWeave, said, "Backblaze has built a reputation for making complex, HDD-based storage infrastructure reliable and easy-to-consume at scale. Were pleased to work with them as we continue expanding our platform and managed service offerings to support AI workloads at scale."
CoreWeave's AI cloud platform is noted as serving leading AI model developers, enterprises, and research organizations, and the announcement states it supports nine of the top ten AI model providers.
The agreement ties a traditional HDD-based storage supplier to an AI-focused cloud provider, aligning lower-cost, high-density storage with higher-performance compute resources. For enterprises and AI developers relying on large datasets and lifecycle storage, the arrangement is positioned as a way to optimize where data resides while keeping compute capacity available for latency- and throughput-sensitive tasks.
While the announcement lays out the technical role Backblaze will play, it does not include details on revenue recognition timing, precise deployment schedules, or the share of CoreWeave's managed storage that will be served by Backblaze. Those factors will determine the agreement's near-term financial impact on both companies.