As the artificial intelligence era surges ahead, data has become digital gold — and Backblaze Inc. is quietly becoming one of its key vaults. Its cloud storage expertise has expanded to cover AI training and inferencing data.

Backblaze’s Gleb Budman discusses AI training data pipelines with theCUBE.

With the company’s history rooted in trusted data backup, it is quietly transitioning to serve enterprise AI workloads. This evolution mirrors the broader industry trend — data is no longer merely archived; it’s being activated.

“Increasingly, we’re now solving customers’ problems around AI,” said Gleb Budman (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Backblaze. “Everybody is trying to help. What we’re seeing is customers building models, doing inferencing and needing just a place to put a lot of data and be able to move that data quickly to wherever they need it to go.”

Budman spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Backblaze’s affordable, open cloud storage is fueling innovation across industries, from drug discovery to robotics. (* Disclosure below.)

Boosting AI training and inference with responsive data delivery

AI workflows comprise five critical stages: data collection, labeling, model creation, inference and logging. Backblaze supports every step, especially through B2 Overdrive, its high-speed transfer service that delivers “up to a terabit per second of throughput,” according to Budman.

“We’ll help customers collect all the data and store it on Backblaze,” he said. “We’ll enable them to label it there, then send it as fast as they can. We launched a service called B2 Overdrive earlier this year. Customers can do up to a terabit per second of throughput. We think it’s the fastest throughput offering per dollar on the market worldwide.”

Cost efficiency is a critical factor in this experimental stage of AI development. That affordability transcends cost savings in corporate ledgers — it presents crucial opportunities for companies to innovate further and strengthen their digital stacks, Budman added.

“We’re about one-fifth the price for the storage, but then one of the huge parts is the egress,” he said. “There are about 200 of these neoclouds now around the world, and customers are saying, ‘I want to use that one,’ or ‘I want to use this one.’ They need to get their data over to them, and the hyperscalers charge these egregious egress fees to send your data out. We make that free.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event:

(* Disclosure: Backblaze sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Backblaze nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE