Backblaze stock jumps 31% on $335M CoreWeave storage deal

Backblaze announced a five-year, $335 million agreement to supply large-scale hard-disk drive storage to AI cloud provider CoreWeave. The company noted the capacity will scale to multi-exabyte levels to support CoreWeave’s managed storage and AI Object Storage platform. Backblaze shares rose as much as 31% in Tuesday trading. CoreWeave shares fell more than 3.5% amid a broader technology-sector pullback.

Under the agreement, Backblaze will provide traditional HDD storage, which uses spinning disks and is typically more cost-efficient than solid-state drives for very large capacity needs. CoreWeave will move large datasets, training checkpoints and archived material to Backblaze’s HDD tiers so its high-performance compute resources can remain focused on intensive AI workloads. CoreWeave customers will be able to access the new storage tiers immediately without changing code.

Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, called storage ‘the foundation every AI workflow is built on’ and characterized the partnership as a way to help organizations meet growing infrastructure demand. Nick Hoover, vice president at CoreWeave, described Backblaze’s platform as reliable and easy to consume at scale.

Backblaze described the agreement as a meaningful commercial commitment and noted the company serves more than 100,000 customers worldwide. The two firms reported CoreWeave counts nine of the top ten AI model providers among its customers.

The companies indicated the pact targets large, persistent datasets that are expensive to keep on higher-cost SSD tiers but are needed for model development, version control and large-scale inference pipelines. Backblaze cited a study estimating the global AI data center market at $147.3 billion in 2025 and projecting growth to $810.6 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 23.9% from 2026 to 2033.