Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 10, 2025.

Driving the Week

Everyone’s in Austin this week for South by Southwest, which has grown extensively since its first outing in 1987.

We’re getting to the end of this earnings cycle, but there are a few significant ones left. Oracle and Asana both announce on Monday, while Adobe and cyber-security leader SentinelOne both release on Wednesday.

CoreWeave’s Big Moment

Looking to cash in on the continuing push for AI infrastructure, specialty cloud-provider CoreWeave has filed for IPO. But before you start picturing ringing bells on Wall Street and champagne toasts, there’s more to the story. A lot more.

Just two days after the IPO filing, CoreWeave made another bold move: acquiring Weights & Biases, a startup that provides machine learning tools for AI developers. The deal shows that CoreWeave isn’t just content with being the muscle behind AI workloads—it wants to own more of the developer ecosystem, too.

The acquisition is a strategic play, bundling AI infrastructure with development tools in a way that could make CoreWeave an even stickier choice for AI startups and enterprises alike.

But just when things were looking like a dream run to Wall Street, the turbulence hit.

The Financial Times dropped a bombshell: Microsoft reportedly pulled back on some of its cloud agreements with CoreWeave over missed delivery commitments. That’s not the kind of headline you want when you’re about to ask public markets for billions. The report suggested that Microsoft, which had been a key customer, was rethinking just how much it wanted to bet on CoreWeave’s ability to scale.

CoreWeave, for its part, strongly disputes this. The company insists that Microsoft remains a major customer and that there are no significant contract disputes. Still, the mere fact that this issue is surfacing now—on the eve of an IPO—is enough to raise eyebrows.

Microsoft’s alleged concerns (whether real or overblown) underscore a broader issue: AI infrastructure is a high-risk business. Demand is sky-high today, but the competitive landscape is shifting fast. AWS, Google Cloud, and even Oracle and Meta are all ramping up AI compute offerings, and hyperscalers aren’t going to let CoreWeave eat their lunch forever.

This one’s a story-in-progress and we’ll keep watching.

Infrastructure Round-Up

Hammerspace is making a play for China’s AI market, partnering with Yition AI to expand its data orchestration tech into one of the world’s biggest AI battlegrounds, all to provide AI developers with a unified storage platform that enables data to be moved seamlessly across cloud and on-prem environments.

The China angle here is key. With Western tech companies facing regulatory and geopolitical challenges in the region, partnerships like this allow AI infrastructure providers to gain market share while navigating complex local requirements. Expect more of these collaborations as AI storage becomes a bigger piece of the infrastructure puzzle.

VDURA is going all-in on high-speed storage, launching its new NVMe-based V5000 to power AI factories and GPU cloud environments. The positioning is clear: as AI models grow, traditional storage architectures won’t cut it – keep that thought in mind as we head into next week’s NVIDIA GTC.

Couchbase launched its new Edge Server to support offline-first, low-latency computing, targeting use cases where AI workloads need to function without always being connected to the cloud.

This plays into a broader trend: AI isn’t just about the data center anymore. Whether autonomous vehicles, robotics, or real-time analytics, AI is pushing into environments where connectivity isn’t guaranteed. Couchbase is addresses this nicely with its new solution, but it’s also an area where we also see Lenovo and Dell aggressively playing.

Transitions

Data protection giant Commvault has a new CIO, appointing Ha Hoang to the role. Hoang was most recently Global Head of Cloud Engineering and Operations for UKG, while prior to that she was Global Head of Technology Operations at McKinsey. It’s a nice hire for Commvault.

VAST Data has poached Rajesh Kapoor away from NetApp as its new VP of System Engineering. Kapoor spent the past 25 years at NetApp where he was most recently Senior Director in its Solutions Architecture team.

High-flying object storage solution provider MinIO is adding to its team, hiring its first Chief Business Officer and its first Chief Marketing Officer. Erik Frieberg joins as CMO, coming from Pantheon Platform, solo.io, and Puppet.

MinIO’s new CBO is Mahesh Patel. Patel arrives from data protection upstart Druva, where he was COO. MinIO is doing a lot of things right and, with these hires, is clearly staging for growth.

What We’re Reading

Where’s all the VC money flowing? According to Bloomberg, The Hottest AI Companies Right Now are Apps, not AI models.

While AI Apps might be the future, they’re having little impact in the present. In a piece from Pew Research, the research giant found that most workers (55%) “rarely or never” use AI chatbots at work. More surprising for those reading this newsletter is that an additional 29% haven’t heard of them at all! Give it a read.

Can you trust AI yet? In a fascinating blog post, Ben Evans addresses The Deep Research Problem, where he tries to use OpenAI’s highly touted Deep Research capabilities only to run into its limitations, leading off by saying:

“OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.”

Maybe you can trust it with your hair (just don’t tell your stylist!): The Washington Post has a fun read about how AI ‘inspo’ is Everywhere, Driving Your Hairstylist Crazy. It leads with “From bridal shops to med-spas to hardware stores, AI generated photos are warping our sense of reality and hurting small businesses along the way.”

Back up everything: Finally, while we often speak metaphorically of “bit rot,” it can be a real thing. Arstechnica reports that DVDs from 2006-2008 are Rotting Away in their Cases. While DVDs are supposed to last up to a century, many are starting to fail now (“they curdle like milk”), with Warner Brothers actively replacing failed discs on request.

Companies mentioned: Adobe, Asana, Cloudbase, Commvault, CoreWeave, Dell, Druva, Hammerspace, Lenovo, Microsoft, MinIO, NetApp, Oracle, SentinelOne, VAST Data, VDURA