Cloud storage company Storj has acquired Valdi, an artificial intelligence (AI) compute provider.
Through the acquisition, Storj will add AI capabilities to its cloud storage offering with Valdi's GPUs.
As a result of the acquisition, all of Valdi's employees will join Storj. The value of the deal has not been shared.
Valdi enables its customers to take advantage of spare GPU compute cycles in data centers globally, similar to how Storj gives its customers access to underutilized storage capacity in data centers in over 100 countries.
This prevents customers from purchasing more resources than they need while reducing the costs of accessing storage and compute.
Storj's chief revenue officer Colby Winegar said: “Today’s enterprises demand new high-performance solutions to innovate affordably and sustainably. Valdi's network of on-demand GPUs is a natural extension of Storj’s distributed cloud and is well-suited to support the needs of today’s most transformative innovators. This strategic acquisition is particularly exciting as our joint storage and GPU offering is optimized for AI workloads.”
Storj and Valdi first partnered in 2023 and integrated their profits shortly after. According to the companies, both Valdi's GPU offering and Storj's S3 cloud object storage are 'infinitely' scalable.
Valdi CEO Nikhil Jain said: "Valdi’s distributed model enables it to surpass traditional approaches to GPU provisioning, especially in the current state of unprecedented demand. Our customers often also have a substantial storage need and uniting our organizations will deliver major benefits to customers while empowering our team to grow faster.”
Valdi counts TensorOpera AI, CalTech, and USC among its customers.
Ben Golub, Storj CEO, added: “Storj was created to build a new cloud for a new era of computing. About 20 years ago, AWS began with object storage (S3), and followed with CPU-based computing (EC2), and then a host of other services. Today, Storj is building on our strong foundation of distributed cloud object storage as well.
"Our strategic decision to join forces with Valdi supports this progress as we continue proving the value of distributed solutions to the enterprise. We are excited to bring attention to the value of DePIN solutions as we continue to work closely with Storj’s robust community of DePIN partners including LivePeer, Akash, POKT, and many more.”
Storj was founded in 2014 and is a system built to use existing unused capacity on already deployed hard drives and storage systems. The company's goal was to provide a cloud storage solution that was cheaper than AWS. The company claims to have object storage with a performance on par with major providers but at 90 percent less cost and dramatically lower carbon emissions.
Storj and Valdi cofounded, alongside Ad Signal, the Digital Sustainability Alliance, a not-for-profit that advocates for technologies that advance environmental stewardship.
