Planned acquisition strengthens NetApp’s position in the rapidly growing AI infrastructure market by bringing differentiated metadata innovation and parallel file architecture designed for AI
NetApp® , the intelligent data infrastructure company, announced its intent to acquire PEAK:AIO, a pioneer in next-generation metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file systems. The planned acquisition is expected to accelerate NetApp’s AI infrastructure roadmap by augmenting metadata services and parallel namespace innovation designed to help AI clouds scale shared storage alongside growing GPU clusters.
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As AI becomes embedded in every enterprise workload, organizations are confronting a new challenge: traditional storage architectures were not designed for the unprecedented scale, concurrency, and performance requirements of AI factories, AI clouds, and next-generation data-intensive applications. NetApp is building an architecture that disaggregates metadata from data and enables metadata services to scale independently, creating a foundation for AI infrastructure capable of supporting trillions of files, exabyte-scale environments, and massively parallel workloads.
The acquisition reinforces NetApp’s strategy to address the rapidly growing market for AI infrastructure. By combining PEAK:AIO’s specialized metadata innovations with NetApp ONTAP® software, customers will benefit from a differentiated architecture that preserves the resilience, security, and operational maturity of ONTAP while introducing a new level of scalability for AI workloads.
“AI clouds need high-performance shared storage that can scale alongside growing GPU clusters while maintaining the resilience, security, and operational simplicity organizations depend on,” said George Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at NetApp. “With PEAK:AIO, we are delivering on our vision for a new generation of AI infrastructure that combines scalable metadata services with the proven foundation of ONTAP to help customers maximize infrastructure efficiency and support AI at hyperscale cloud.”
PEAK:AIO’s technology originated from collaborations with leading research institutions, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University, and was designed to address some of the industry’s most demanding data-intensive computing challenges. The planned integration will add specialized metadata services and parallel namespace innovation to NetApp’s ONTAP-based data architecture, while creating a clear evolution path for existing ONTAP customers.
“NetApp and PEAK:AIO connected through the shared belief that the AI era demands a fundamentally new approach to data infrastructure,” said Mark Klarzynski, Chief Technology Officer and Founder at PEAK:AIO. “What excites us most about joining NetApp is the opportunity to pair our culture of innovation with the reach, scale, and customer trust of a global leader. Together with NetApp, we have an opportunity to help shape that future and deliver technologies that make managing data at a massive scale both practical and accessible.”
PEAK:AIO’s metadata innovation extends metadata scale, delivers a global namespace, and enables parallel NFS-based access for massively parallel workloads, while NetApp contributes trusted ONTAP expertise, global reach, and operational maturity to make AI-scale file infrastructure more practical and accessible. Together, they are expected to deliver new capabilities that simplify the deployment and operation of shared storage for increasingly large AI environments.
The architecture is intended to support trillions of files and multi-exabyte deployments while preserving the resiliency, security, and operational simplicity customers expect from ONTAP. Designed around the needs of large-scale AI environments, it combines scalable metadata services, standards-based parallel NFS access, and ONTAP as the resilient data foundation to help reduce data-related GPU stalls, improve infrastructure efficiency, and accelerate AI innovation.
The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
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