DDN, a leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, announced it has received a $300 million investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities at a $5 billion valuation. This investment will help fund DDN’s continued rapid growth as it serves its customers’ fast-expanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software and infrastructure needs.
Launched in 1998, DDN has thousands of customers and supports over 500,000 NVIDIA 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. And 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 essential to assisting highly data-intensive AI and HPC workloads and ensuring maximum GPU utilization for the best performance and return on investment possible.
Building on a two-decade heritage as a leader in high-performance storage, the company is a partner for leading organizations seeking to implement scalable, reliable, and secure AI applications that deliver tangible business outcomes. And 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 is a leader in investing in the digital infrastructure driving AI innovation. And Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world with holdings across the U.S., Europe, India, and Japan. The company also recently invested 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.
KEY QUOTES:
“Blackstone’s support accelerates our mission to redefine the enterprise AI infrastructure category and scale at an even faster rate. 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.”
– 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. 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.”
– Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder of DDN
“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.”
– Jas Khaira, Head of Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, Americas
“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.”
– John Watson, Managing Director at Blackstone
