Blackstone Invests $300 Million at a $5 billion Valuation in DDN, AI and Data Intelligence Solutions Leader, to Fuel Further Rapid Growth

January 09, 2025 at 08:30 AM EST

DDN, a global leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, today announced it has received a $300 million investment from funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities (“Blackstone”) at a $5 billion valuation. The investment 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 organizations ranging from top financial services, life sciences, and public sector clients to AI hyperscalers 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 utilization 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 organizations 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.

“Blackstone’s support accelerates our mission to redefine the enterprise AI infrastructure category and scale at an even faster rate,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder of DDN. “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.”

“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.”

John Watson, Managing Director at Blackstone, said: “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.”

Blackstone is a leader in investing in the digital infrastructure driving AI innovation. Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world with holdings across the U.S., Europe, India, and Japan. The company also recently made major investments 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.

For more information about DDN’s mission to transform data intelligence and redefine enterprise AI, visit www.ddn.com, DDN blog, and register for "Beyond Artificial".

About Blackstone

Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager. We seek to deliver compelling returns for institutional and individual investors by strengthening the companies in which we invest. Our more than $1.1 trillion in assets under management include global investment strategies focused on real estate, private equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, credit, real assets, secondaries, and hedge funds. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow @blackstone on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

About DDN

DDN is the world’s leading AI and data intelligence company, empowering organizations to maximize the value of their data with end-to-end HPC and AI-focused solutions. Its customers range from the largest global enterprises and AI hyperscalers 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. Follow DDN: LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.