Blackstone Invests $300 Million in DDN
DDN, the world’s leading AI and data intelligence solutions, on Thursday said that it has received a $300 million investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities (Blackstone) at a $5 billion valuation.
The investment by Blackstone, the world’s largest assets manager with over $1.1 trillion funds under management, 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 GPUs for organisations ranging from top financial services, life sciences, and public sector clients to AI hyper-scalers 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 utilisation 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 organisations 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.
Redefining AI Infrastructure
DDN’s CEO and co-founder Alex Bouzari said that Blackstone’s support accelerated their mission to redefine the enterprise AI infrastructure category and scale at an even faster rate.
He said that by fuelling DDN’s mission to push the boundaries of data intelligence, they can empower organisations worldwide with next-level AI solutions that drive ground-breaking innovation and deliver significant returns on their investments.
DDN President and co-founder Paul Bloch said that this investment enable them to execute DDN’s strategy to bring enterprise-grade AI solutions to companies of all sizes, transforming industries and delivering measurable outcomes.
“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,” he added.
Blackstone’s Managing Director John Watson said that Alex and Paul have built a highly innovative business that was poised to help further propel the exponential growth in AI and they were 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 the largest data center provider in the world with holdings across the US, Europe, India, and Japan. The company also recently made major investments in CoreWeave, a specialised provider of critical cloud infrastructure pioneering the AI revolution. BofA Securities acted as the exclusive financial advisor to DDN in connection with the transaction.
DDN’s customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyper-scalers 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.
