Wasabi banks $70m to expand move into AI infrastructure

Wasabi has received US$70 million in equity funding to accelerate its push into AI infrastructure. The company says it will also allow it to expand its global footprint and enhance its product portfolio. The money values the company at $1.8 billion and brings its total funding raised to over $600 million. The funding round was led by L2 Point Management with participation from Pure Storage and existing investors.

David Friend, co-founder and CEO of Wasabi Technologies, said, “We’re ushering in the next generation of cloud storage, powering data-intensive workloads like generative AI and autonomous systems.

“This funding underscores Wasabi’s strong market position and continued growth as enterprises and AI developers alike seek a better, more predictable alternative to the hyperscalers.”

AI needs better storage solutions

While all the big announcements around AI recently have been on AI GPUs, CPUs and infrastructure, little has been said about the data architecture. That’s because the AI vendors are ingesting data from where it is currently located to reduce the costs to organisations. Additionally, the vast majority of the data conversation has been around data quality and trust.

But as the ability to process data with AI hardware increases, there comes a point where it is just sitting waiting on the data infrastructure. Part of that will be the ability to ingest the data, and part will be the ability to write out the results.

For the hyperscalers, the solution is simple. Give us your data, and we will handle this within our platform. However, they are not immune to bottlenecks in the data architectures, although they do have the money to throw at trying to resolve the problem.

However, not everyone wants to leave their data in the hands of the hyperscalers. Organisations are increasingly looking at keeping control of their data for regulatory and security reasons. That means that they want an alternative solution. There is also a growing number of tier 2 AI infrastructure cloud providers that also need ultra-high-speed storage solutions. It is these two groups that Wasabi appears to be targeting.

What is Wasabi’s AI portfolio?

The core of its products is its Hot Cloud Storage solution. It doesn’t charge for egress or API requests to data, positioning it as a cost-predictable solution. For data security, it has launched Covert Copy to protect against ransomware. It says it is ransomware-resistant and ensures critical data remains invisible and untouchable, even after a cyberattack.

There are two key tools that it offers as part of its AI portfolio. The first is Wasabi AiR. This sits on its hot cloud storage solution and offers AI-powered metadata tagging. The second is Wasabi Fire. This is an NVMe storage class. It is designed for compute-intensive AI and ML training, real-time inference, data logging, and media pipelines.

The company says that part of the funds raised in this equity funding will be used to expand its AI offerings. What isn’t clear yet is what this means. Is the money just funding the next generation of existing products? Is it going to announce new solutions? Will those solutions be software or hardware-based?

The latter would be interesting. There has been a surge in vendors developing enterprise-grade NVMe storage devices to meet demand from customers. But there is a shortage of the underlying components, which is keeping prices high. That has persuaded some companies, such as Micron, to focus on enterprise customers only.

If Wasabi is going to launch new hardware, how will it handle component shortages? Will it agree preferential treatment with manufacturers? Will it pass on spiralling costs to customers, or cushion them against such rises?

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

It’s important to note that Wasabi is not just providing storage for AI, despite that being part of this announcement. It has a number of customers in the media and entertainment market, where storage capacity and speed are also critical.

Additionally, it has customers who do complex analytics with large data sets. They also require high-speed and reliable storage and it will be looking at improving its solutions for those.

The company is holding a press event in Liverpool on Friday, where it will hopefully give more details on how the funds are to be spent.

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