CoreWeave has launched an egress fee-free data migration program in its biggest challenge yet to the hyperscalers and other cloud giants.

Through its Zero Egress Migration (0EM) service, the neocloud vendor will cover egress fees for customers moving typical AI workloads to CoreWeave from the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, and Alibaba.

According to the firm, enterprises will be able to maintain active accounts with third-party cloud providers both during and after the migration, with the promise of no exit fees from CoreWeave.

With the service, customer data is stored in CoreWeave AI Object Storage and consolidated into a single global dataset. This was said to reduce redundancy and inefficiencies from the data replication and sprawl inherent in cloud migrations.

CoreWeave’s custom Local Object Transport Accelerator (LOTA) technology is set up to provide consistent throughput of 7 Gb/s per GPU, regardless of data location, allowing flexibility for large-scale and multi-cloud AI workloads.

0EM also includes a dashboard for real-time monitoring of data migration, including progress tracking, performance metrics, and data integrity validation.

The service has been trialed by AI healthcare firm Hologen and AI-driven scientific test platform Periodic Labs.

“Today’s industry standard for data storage is not designed for the era of AI, where massive datasets need to move fast and freely within and between clouds. Penny pinching egress and transfer fees do little but slow down innovation,” said Peter Salanki, co-founder and chief technology officer of CoreWeave. “With AI Object Storage and 0EM, CoreWeave is creating the most supportive and performant cloud ecosystem for AI data management, eliminating physical, digital, and financial barriers to progress.”

The release of 0EM adds to the neocloud's existing commitment to not charge egress fees for customers wanting to move off its platform.

While CoreWeave is slashing costs around egress, its rivals have made similar strides, with AWS launching reduced data transfer rates for customers in the EU in line with the bloc's Data Act.

0EM's launch follows CoreWeave entering into a $1.17 billion agreement with AI storage vendors Vast Data.

The deal will see Vast’s AI OS serve as the primary data storage and management platform underneath CoreWeave’s compute infrastructure, feeding data to all of the AI training and inference workloads for CoreWeave customers such as Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft.