NEW YORK, June 23, 2026, 14:01 (EDT)
- Backblaze shares surged around 40% in afternoon trading after the cloud-storage company said it struck a multi-year deal with CoreWeave.
- The first order forms are valued at around $335 million, but final payments will depend on how much storage is actually used.
- Backblaze moves further into AI infrastructure with the deal, stepping up against bigger cloud competitors.
Backblaze Inc. stock jumped in busy trade Tuesday after the cloud-storage firm announced a $335 million storage deal with CoreWeave. The agreement offers investors a new AI infrastructure angle for a business still trading below $700 million in market value.
The stock surged 39.8% to $11.35 during the afternoon, hitting a high of $11.37, with about 26.5 million shares traded. The iShares Russell 2000 ETF slipped 0.5%. The Invesco QQQ Trust, following the Nasdaq-100, dropped 2.7%.
The deal stands out right now given Backblaze’s size. The company put up $158.2 million in annual recurring revenue at the end of Q1. That run-rate is based on recurring sales. B2 Cloud Storage revenue climbed 24% year over year in the quarter, ahead of the company’s computer-backup segment.
Backblaze is set to deliver multi-exabyte storage to CoreWeave, the company said. An exabyte equals a billion gigabytes. The new storage will be used for parts of CoreWeave’s managed infrastructure and its HDD-based storage tiers in CoreWeave AI Object Storage. HDDs, or hard-disk drives, tend to offer lower cost but less speed than solid-state drives.
“Storage is the foundation every AI workflow is built on,” Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman said in the release. CoreWeave VP Nick Hoover called Backblaze’s HDD infrastructure “reliable and easy-to-consume at scale.” Backblaze
Backblaze said in a filing the master strategic deal with CoreWeave took effect June 16. The deal covers Backblaze B2 object storage capacity—which stores large unstructured data like video, images, and model outputs—and a managed storage setup at CoreWeave data centers. Initial agreements span five and seven years. Backblaze put the total value around $335 million.
CoreWeave shares slipped 3.3% Tuesday afternoon. The company is pushing to expand AI capacity. First-quarter revenue came in at $2.08 billion, up more than two times from a year ago. Revenue backlog now sits near $100 billion. CEO Michael Intrator said it was CoreWeave’s “strongest bookings quarter.” CoreWeave Investors
Backblaze is also linked to a client making its own storage gear. CoreWeave’s storage page describes its AI Object Storage as built for training and running models at scale, with a caching setup to bring data closer to the GPUs that handle AI workloads.
Backblaze is still under heavy competitive pressure. In its annual report, the company lists Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure as competitors. Backblaze says a lot of these rivals have stronger brands, wider product lines and more resources.
But this deal does not mean guaranteed revenue. The filing showed payouts will depend on storage use and other things, and Backblaze gave CoreWeave warrants for up to 4.2 million shares at $7.60 each. That could dilute current holders if exercised. The risk: AI storage demand might still rise, but big platforms, hardware firms or customers building their own stacks could grab most of the profits.
