Blackstone Invests $300 Million in AI Data Storage Firm DDN at $5 Billion Valuation

AI Storage Play: 26-Year-Old DDN Snags $300M Investment At $5B Valuation

"The funding will let us accelerate R&D, accelerate processes, accelerate go-to-market, create more reseller partnerships and more OEM partnerships, and so forth to enable us to develop the company across the board and accelerate it," says DDN President and co-founder Paul Bloch. DDN, a developer of high-performance storage technology, was founded in 1998, and claims to be quite profitable. On Thursday, however, the Chatsworth, Calif.-based storage vendor unveiled the close of $300 million in funding from Blackstone, DDN's first funding infusion since it closed a small funding round just days before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. Given that DDN doesn't need the money, why the new funding? DDN President and co-founder Paul Bloch gave CRN a one-word answer to that question: "Acceleration." "The funding will let us accelerate R&D, accelerate processes, accelerate go-to-market, create more reseller partnerships and more OEM partnerships, and so forth to enable us to develop the company across the board and accelerate it," Bloch said. [Related: Storage 100: The Digital Bridge Between The Cloud And On-Premises Worlds] The company is looking to accelerate in a couple areas, including hiring more employees than the 300 it hired in 2024. It also wants to accelerate storage technology development for AI needs, an area where it has already made a name for itself, but where Bloch said it can do much more. "It's a perfect storm for DDN," he said. "We have been building up a very, very large system at scale for 20-plus years. It's not easy. It's extremely difficult. And we've done it for the largest organizations for the past 20 years. And starting eight years ago, we started doing it with Nvidia. And so, it's really a natural continuation of DDN, except that we're doing it at the enterprise level. ... Now we have technologies to address very large training and large inference. We have technology lined up with digital twins. So we're perfectly lined up with whatever companies might require in the age of AI." On a sadder note, DDN is headquartered very close to where the wind-blown wildfires are raging around the north and west of Los Angeles. Those fires, which have claimed at least five lives and thousands of structures, have resulted in a number of DDN employees losing their homes, Bloch said. "We're obviously taking good care of our team," he said. "We believe we have a couple of people that might have lost their homes, and so we already have plans to help them out. Because we do believe, first and foremost, in the end, that we are a family and we take care of our people, and we've demonstrated that in the past. It seems now that it is subsiding a little bit. But it is actually totally crazy. I personally have many friends that have lost their homes." Read more of CRN's conversation with Bloch, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

DDN Nabs $300M From Blackstone As AI Keeps Data Storage Hot

Private equity giant Blackstone Group is making a $300 million strategic investment into DDN, valuing the Chatsworth, California-based data storage company at $5 billion. Founded in 1998, DDN -- formerly called DataDirect Networks -- helps companies store, analyze and manage data -- a value commodity as more businesses look to create and train AI models. The company plans to use the new cash to expand in industries ranging from healthcare to autonomous vehicles and accelerate product innovation, including for its AI data intelligence platform. Of course this is far from the only play the Blackstone Group has made in the data sector. Last year it was reported the world's largest asset manager plans to invest $8.2 billion to develop data centers in Spain. In 2023, it partnered with Digital Realty to develop $7 billion in data centers targeting providers of online content, cloud services and artificial intelligence. Blackstone also is a backer of CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure startup that gives access to highly sought-after AI chips from Nvidia. In general, datacenters and data storage and management have been hot among investors as businesses of all sizes try to use their data to scale up AI initiatives.

Blackstone Invests $300 Million at a $5 billion Valuation in DDN, AI and Data Intelligence Solutions Leader, to Fuel Further Rapid Growth By Investing.com

CHATSWORTH, Calif. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DDN, a global leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, today announced it has received a $300 million investment from funds managed by Blackstone (NYSE:BX) Tactical Opportunities (Blackstone) at a $5 billion valuation. The investment will be used to help fund DDN's continued rapid growth as it serves its customers' fast-expanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software and infrastructure needs. Founded in 1998, DDN has thousands of customers and supports over 500,000 NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) GPUs for organizations ranging from top financial services, life sciences, and public sector clients to AI hyperscalers and cloud providers such as xAI and Lambda. DDN high-performance data intelligence platform is used to power NVIDIA clusters. DDN's solutions help make data rapidly accessible for analysis and processing at high throughput and low latency " which are critical to helping power highly data-intensive AI and HPC workloads and ensuring maximum GPU utilization for the best performance and return on investment possible. Building on its two-decade heritage as a leader in high-performance storage, the company is a partner of choice for leading organizations seeking to implement scalable, reliable, and secure AI applications that deliver tangible business outcomes. DDN's platform enables rapid data ingestion, real-time processing, and significantly faster insight generation"accelerating enterprise deployments of LLMs, Gen AI, and RAG for customer-facing applications, predictive analytics, and operational improvements. Blackstone's support accelerates our mission to redefine the enterprise AI infrastructure category and scale at an even faster rate, said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder of DDN. By fueling our mission to push the boundaries of data intelligence, we believe we can empower organizations worldwide with next-level AI solutions that drive groundbreaking innovation and deliver significant returns on their investments. This investment enables us to execute our strategy to bring enterprise-grade AI solutions to companies of all sizes, transforming industries and delivering measurable outcomes, said Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder of DDN. DDN is laser-focused on solving real AI business challenges, from accelerating LLM deployments to enhancing inferencing, so our customers can unlock their data's potential and achieve tangible ROI faster than ever. Jas Khaira, Head of Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, Americas, said: The digital infrastructure powering the AI revolution continues to be among our highest conviction investment themes at Blackstone. DDN's solutions are trusted by many of the most important AI companies in the world and are critical to the next phase of development for transformative AI deployments. We are thrilled to be the first institutional investor in DDN and help further strengthen its market leadership for high-intensity AI workloads. John Watson, Managing Director at Blackstone, said: Alex and Paul have built a highly innovative business that is poised to help further propel the exponential growth in artificial intelligence. We're excited to partner with them and their team to further expand DDN's reach and solutions in the years to come for the benefit of their customers. Blackstone is a leader in investing in the digital infrastructure driving AI innovation. Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world with holdings across the U.S., Europe, India, and Japan. The company also recently made major investments in CoreWeave, a specialized provider of critical cloud infrastructure pioneering the AI revolution. BofA Securities acted as the exclusive financial advisor to DDN in connection with the transaction. For more information about DDN's mission to transform data intelligence and redefine enterprise AI, visit www.ddn.com, DDN blog, and register for "Beyond Artificial". About Blackstone Blackstone is the world's largest alternative asset manager. We seek to deliver compelling returns for institutional and individual investors by strengthening the companies in which we invest. Our more than $1.1 trillion in assets under management include global investment strategies focused on real estate, private equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, credit, real assets, secondaries, and hedge funds. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow @blackstone on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and Instagram. About DDN DDN is the world's leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers to cutting-edge research centers, all leveraging DDN's proven data intelligence platform for scalable, secure, and high-performance AI deployments that drive 10x returns. Follow DDN: LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

Blackstone Invests USD 300 Million in AI and Data Intelligence Firm DDN

DDN's platform accelerates AI, LLM deployments, and real-time data processing. Blackstone has invested USD 300 million in an AI and data intelligence solutions company called DDN. On Thursday, January 9, DDN announced that it had received this investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities (Blackstone) at a USD 5 billion valuation. This investment will be used to help fund DDN's growth as it meets its customer's fast-expanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software and infrastructure needs, Blackstone said. Also Read: Blackstone and CPP Investments to Acquire AirTrunk for Over AUD 24 Billion Founded in 1998, DDN reportedly has thousands of customers and supports over 500,000 Nvidia GPUs across organisations ranging from financial services, life sciences, and public sector clients to AI hyperscalers and cloud providers such as xAI and Lambda. Its high-performance data intelligence platform is used to power Nvidia clusters. DDN's solutions help make data rapidly accessible for analysis and processing at high throughput and low latency, which are critical to for powering highly data-intensive AI and HPC workloads and ensuring maximum GPU utilization for the best performance and return on investment possible, Blackstone explained. DDN's platform enables rapid data ingestion, real-time processing, and significantly faster insight generation -- accelerating enterprise deployments of LLMs, Gen AI, and RAG for customer-facing applications, predictive analytics, and operational improvements, Blackstone added. Also Read: Digital Realty, Blackstone to Develop USD 7 Billion Hyperscale Data Centers "By fueling our mission to push the boundaries of data intelligence, we believe we can empower organizations worldwide with next-level AI solutions that drive groundbreaking innovation and deliver significant returns on their investments," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder of DDN. "This investment enables us to execute our strategy to bring enterprise-grade AI solutions to companies of all sizes, transforming industries and delivering measurable outcomes," said Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder of DDN. "DDN is laser-focused on solving real AI business challenges, from accelerating LLM deployments to enhancing inferencing, so our customers can unlock their data's potential and achieve tangible ROI faster than ever." Jas Khaira, Head of Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, Americas, said: "The digital infrastructure powering the AI revolution continues to be among our highest conviction investment themes at Blackstone. DDN's solutions are trusted by many of the most important AI companies in the world and are critical to the next phase of development for transformative AI deployments. We are thrilled to be the first institutional investor in DDN and help further strengthen its market leadership for high-intensity AI workloads." "This partnership represents more than just an infusion of capital -- it is a vote of confidence in our vision to reshape enterprise AI infrastructure and deliver transformative outcomes," said Jyothi Swaroop, CMO at DDN. He added "AI is transforming how we work, play, stay healthy, and be safe. For it to fulfill its promise of faster performance, large language models, training, and inference have to go way up and costs have to go way down (GPU efficiency, data center space, power consumption)." Also Read: Amazon Invests USD 4 Billion More in Anthropic, Expands AI Partnership BofA Securities acted as the exclusive financial advisor to DDN in the transaction. According to the statement, Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world, with holdings across the US, Europe, India, and Japan. In May 2024, Blackstone also made major investments in AI hyperscaler CoreWeave. The company operates a footprint of data centers covering every region of the US.

Blackstone Invests $300 Million In AI Data Firm That Powers Elon Musk's xAI Supercomputer - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Blackstone (NYSE:BX)

Blackstone Inc. BX is making a significant move in the AI sector with a $300 million investment in DDN, a company known for its expertise in data storage and analysis. What Happened: The investment represents the first external funding for DDN, valuing the Chatsworth, California-based firm at $5 billion. Founded in 1998 by computer scientists Alex Bouzari and Paul Bloch, DDN provides computing equipment and software essential for managing data during AI model training and deployment, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Initially serving government agencies and research organizations, DDN has shifted its focus as businesses increasingly adopt AI technologies. CEO Bouzari stated that Blackstone's investment will help expand DDN's business-customer base, making AI more cost-effective. DDN's technology is integral to major AI infrastructure projects, including the Colossus supercomputer by Elon Musk's xAI. The company is considered a strong competitor in the field and could potentially pursue an IPO in the coming years, sources suggest. Blackstone's investment strategy aligns with its broader AI focus, having previously acquired data-center operator QTS and engaged in significant deals with Digital Realty and AirTrunk. The firm has also supported CoreWeave in financing rounds backed by AI chips. Why It Matters: The investment by Blackstone comes at a time when major tech companies are heavily investing in AI infrastructure. Recently, Microsoft Corp. announced plans to allocate $80 billion toward AI data centers for fiscal 2025. This move underscores the growing demand for computing power necessary for AI model training and deployment. Furthermore, Blackstone's strategic investments in AI-related companies, such as its acquisition of a stake in Citrin Cooperman Advisors LLC, highlight its commitment to expanding its presence in the AI sector. These investments are part of a broader trend among private equity firms to fuel growth in technology and advisory services. Read More: SoftBank-Owned Arm Eyes Acquisition Of Oracle-Backed Chip Designer Ampere Computing Amid Nvidia's Dominance: Report Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. BXBlackstone Inc$174.651.93%Overview Rating:Good62.5%Technicals Analysis1000100Financials Analysis400100WatchlistOverviewMSFTMicrosoft Corp$423.990.38%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs