Backblaze Lands $335M CoreWeave Deal for HDD-Based AI Storage Tiers

The five-year, multi-exabyte deal places Backblaze's HDD-based storage directly inside CoreWeave's AI Object Storage as a cost-efficient capacity tier, preserving higher-performance resources for active AI workloads. CoreWeave's customer base — nine of the top ten AI model providers — means this storage architecture will be tested at the largest scale of AI training and inference. Watch whether existing CoreWeave customers migrate meaningful data volumes to the new HDD tiers, and whether Backblaze replicates this model with other neoclouds.

The Backblaze-CoreWeave deal extends a relationship that predates this agreement. CoreWeave already has a $1.17 billion deal with VAST Data, signed in November 2025, establishing VAST as the primary flash-based data platform for its AI cloud (per Reuters, November 2025). Backblaze's HDD-based tier is complementary, handling capacity storage while VAST serves higher-performance workloads. Blocks and Files (June 2026) noted that VAST Data CTO Alon Horev had previously said there was no cost pressure to move older data to archives — a claim the Backblaze deal may challenge.

Backblaze's neocloud strategy has been building for over a year. The company launched B2 Neo, a white-label storage product for neocloud operators, in Q4 2025, and reported signing its first eight-figure neocloud deal that same quarter (per Backblaze IR, February 2026). On its Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Gleb Budman said flash is "about 10 times more expensive per terabyte than hard drives" and becomes "unsustainable at exabyte scale," driving neoclouds to add HDD tiers (per Motley Fool, May 2026). Backblaze estimated its neocloud storage opportunity at $14 billion by 2030, with Q1 2026 revenue of $38.7 million and B2 Cloud Storage growing 24% year over year.

The deal's structure goes beyond a simple services contract. Per Backblaze's SEC 8-K filing (June 2026), the Master Strategic Agreement includes order terms of five and seven years, and Backblaze issued warrants to CoreWeave for up to approximately 4.2 million shares at a $7.60 exercise price, vesting quarterly over five years — aligning incentives across the contract duration. BLZE shares rose roughly 30–44% on the announcement (per Benzinga and Barchart, June 2026), and William Blair upgraded the stock from Underperform to Market Perform, reversing a downgrade from just three months earlier (per Barchart, June 2026).