Backblaze (BLZE) shares jumped after the company announced a significant storage deal with CoreWeave, one of the most prominent AI-focused cloud compute providers backed by Nvidia and major institutional investors. CoreWeave will use Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage to support AI training and inference workloads, pairing cheap, S3-compatible object storage with CoreWeave's GPU clusters — a combination that addresses cost pressures in AI infrastructure.
The deal matters because CoreWeave is not a small partner. CoreWeave recently completed one of the largest tech IPOs of 2025 and is scaling aggressively to serve AI model builders. A storage relationship with a hyperscale-adjacent AI cloud operator could meaningfully expand Backblaze's addressable revenue, particularly given the data-intensive nature of AI training pipelines that require persistent, high-throughput object storage.
For Backblaze bulls, this is the partnership inflection the thesis has always needed — a proof point that B2 can win enterprise and AI-scale customers away from AWS S3, Azure Blob, and Google Cloud Storage on price and simplicity. BLZE has historically traded at a steep discount to larger cloud storage peers and has faced consistent profitability questions; a durable CoreWeave revenue stream could shift both metrics.
The bear case centers on deal concentration risk and execution. A single named partnership, however large, doesn't guarantee recurring revenue at scale — contract terms, volume commitments, and renewal risk are unknown. Backblaze has also historically struggled to convert headline partnerships into sustained margin improvement, and the stock's jump may already price in optimistic assumptions.
What to watch: any disclosure of contract value or revenue contribution in upcoming filings, CoreWeave's own scaling trajectory as a read-through to storage demand, and whether Backblaze can announce additional AI-ecosystem partnerships to confirm this is a trend rather than a single deal.