Backblaze, the cloud storage company, has signed a $335 million, five-year contract with CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure firm. The deal could significantly boost Backblaze's revenue but also ties a large portion of its business to a single customer.
A storage deal built for AI workloads
CoreWeave provides high-performance cloud services for AI training and inference, which require massive amounts of data storage. The agreement means CoreWeave will tap Backblaze's storage infrastructure over the next five years. For Backblaze, the contract represents a substantial chunk of its annual revenue, though the company hasn't specified the exact percentage.
The revenue opportunity and the dependency risk
Backblaze has long positioned itself as a lower-cost alternative to giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Winning a deal of this size validates its model. But it also concentrates risk. If CoreWeave's business slows, or if it decides to build its own storage, Backblaze could feel the hit quickly. The company now needs to show it can diversify its customer base while holding onto this anchor client.
The deal comes as the AI industry's hunger for data storage grows. CoreWeave itself has raised billions in funding and expanded its data center footprint. The five-year term locks in revenue for Backblaze but also locks in dependence. Investors will watch how the company handles that balance.
Backblaze's next quarterly filing should reveal how the deal affects its revenue mix. The company will also have to manage the operational demands of serving a single customer at that scale. For now, the contract signals that AI companies are looking beyond the big three cloud providers for storage — and that smaller players can win.
