Cloud storage provider Backblaze has signed a five-year, multi-exabyte storage deal with CoreWeave, the leading neocloud infrastructure provider, valued at $335 million.

CoreWeave serves as a primary cloud platform for major AI model developers, enterprises, and research organizations, including nine of the top ten AI model providers. Under the agreement, Backblaze will provide HDD-based storage tiers for CoreWeave's AI Object Storage service. Existing CoreWeave AI Object Storage customers leveraging its proprietary LOTA distributed cache will immediately gain access to these new storage tiers without requiring any code modifications. In November, storage software company VAST Data similarly signed a $1.17 billion contract with CoreWeave to supply storage and software for its AI Cloud infrastructure.

Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, commented: "Storage is the foundation every AI workflow is built on — without it, even the world's most powerful compute sits idle. We're 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's B2 Cloud Storage service serves more than 100,000 customers globally, with four neoclouds now among its customer base. B2 Neo, a purpose-built white-label version of B2 Cloud Storage, has been developed specifically for neocloud operators.

During Backblaze's fiscal 2027 earnings call, Budman addressed the economic dynamics driving adoption of tiered storage architectures. He noted that while some neoclouds initially deployed flash-based cloud storage for its performance characteristics, this approach has become economically challenging as platforms have scaled and AI workloads have expanded. Flash-based storage now costs approximately ten times more per terabyte than hard disk drives, making it well-suited for latency-critical applications with smaller datasets but economically unsustainable at exabyte scale. As a result, neoclouds are actively adopting cost-efficient hard drive tiers to balance performance and economics across their infrastructure.

CoreWeave VP Nick Hoover stated: "Backblaze has built a reputation for making complex, HDD-based storage infrastructure reliable and easy-to-consume at scale. We're pleased to work with them as we continue expanding our platform and managed service offerings to support AI workloads at scale."

VAST Data serves as the primary storage capacity supplier to neoclouds. When recently asked whether the presence of many petabytes of data stored on VAST flash systems at neocloud customers might create cost pressure to migrate legacy data to archive solutions, VAST co-founder and CTO Alon Horev declined to confirm this. However, Backblaze's $335 million commitment suggests he may need to reconsider that assessment.