Blackstone has invested USD 300 million in an AI and data intelligence solutions company called DDN. On Thursday, January 9, DDN announced that it had received this investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities (Blackstone) at a USD 5 billion valuation. This investment will be used to help fund DDN's growth as it meets its customer's fast-expanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software and infrastructure needs, Blackstone said.
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AI and High-Performance Computing
Founded in 1998, DDN reportedly has thousands of customers and supports over 500,000 Nvidia GPUs across organisations ranging from financial services, life sciences, and public sector clients to AI hyperscalers and cloud providers such as xAI and Lambda.
Its 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 for powering highly data-intensive AI and HPC workloads and ensuring maximum GPU utilization for the best performance and return on investment possible, Blackstone explained.
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 added.
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AI Infrastructure and Data Intelligence
"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," said 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," said Paul Bloch, President and Co-Founder of DDN. "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."
Jas Khaira, Head of Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, Americas, said: "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."
"This partnership represents more than just an infusion of capital—it is a vote of confidence in our vision to reshape enterprise AI infrastructure and deliver transformative outcomes," said Jyothi Swaroop, CMO at DDN.
He added "AI is transforming how we work, play, stay healthy, and be safe. For it to fulfill its promise of faster performance, large language models, training, and inference have to go way up and costs have to go way down (GPU efficiency, data center space, power consumption)."
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Blackstone's Investment in AI Digital Infrastructure
BofA Securities acted as the exclusive financial advisor to DDN in the transaction.
According to the statement, Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world, with holdings across the US, Europe, India, and Japan. In May 2024, Blackstone also made major investments in AI hyperscaler CoreWeave. The company operates a footprint of data centers covering every region of the US.
