Backblaze has secured a deal worth $335 million to provide its cloud storage solutions to Blackstone and Nvidia-backed neocloud, CoreWeave.

The “multi-exabyte” deal will see Backblaze provide storage capacity for CoreWeave’s managed storage infrastructure, helping the neocloud giant to optimize data placement across performance tiers while preserving high-performance storage resources.

“Storage is the foundation every AI workflow is built on – without it, even the world’s most powerful compute sits idle,” said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO, Backblaze. “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 launched a purpose-built iteration of its flagship B2 offering specifically targeting neoclouds in late February. Dubbed B2 Neo, the offering is tailored to support GPU-centric operators with storage layers capable of handling the sizable datasets and high-throughput workloads typically sent in bursts by players like Vultr, Nscale, and CoreWeave.

CoreWeave, meanwhile, has quickly risen to place itself among the poster boys of the neclouds. Synergy Research Group (SRG) listed the company as “standing out as the most direct challenger to traditional hyperscale cloud providers” in an April report, firmly ahead of rivals like Nebius, Nscale, and Lambda.

It’s among the neoclouds building data center facilities in the "US East" region, which contains Northern Virginia, New York, and Atlanta, according to Backblaze’s own quarterly Network Stats report. The firm already supports workloads in New Jersey, though it’s also looking to the Midwest with plans for a 180MW facility in Indiana.

In terms of its data and storage needs, CoreWeave already makes use of Vast Data’s AI operating system (OS), having signed a mammoth $1.17 billion deal last November.

“Backblaze has built a reputation for making complex, HDD-based storage infrastructure reliable and easy-to-consume at scale,” Nick Hoover, VP, CoreWeave, said following its latest deal. “We’re pleased to work with them as we continue expanding our platform and managed service offerings to support AI workloads at scale.”