DDN Introduces Breakthrough AI Data Architecture That Shields Customers From Global NAND Shortage and Delivers Unmatched Performance at Lower Cost

DDN, a reference in AI data platform, announced new innovations across its EXA and Infinia product lines that enable organizations to achieve full AI performance and GPU utilization even as global NAND shortages drive SSD prices up by 75-125%.These advancements uniquely position DDN as the only vendor capable of maintaining AI factory performance while dramatically lowering storage costs during a multi-year flash supply crisis.

Hyperscalers, national cloud providers, and enterprises across industries are facing unprecedented challenges as rising demand from AI workloads pushes NAND supply to its limits. SSD and HDD pricing volatility is disrupting timelines, creating budget uncertainty, and threatening AI project execution at scale. DDN’s AI data architecture solves this problem.

What Analysts are Saying about the Crisis
Research firm, TrendForce, projects that contract prices for NAND flash will rise 5-10% in 4Q 2025, driven by shortage spillover from HDD scarcity and increased enterprise SSD and QLC demand among cloud/AI buyers. The report notes that suppliers are reallocating output toward higher-margin, enterprise-oriented NAND products, reducing the availability of lower-tier flash and tightening overall supply.

Morgan Stanley, in a September 2025 report, projected that AI-driven demand for enterprise SSD (eSSD) and other NAND‑flash memory could create a significant total addressable market, but also warned of “potential shortages” emerging by the second half of 2026.

DDN Eliminates Risk
“AI depends on increasingly fast, scalable, and cost-efficient data infrastructure, and the global NAND shortage makes traditional flash-dependent architectures unsustainable,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, DDN. “DDN’s EXAScaler and Infinia platforms allow customers to achieve full GPU performance using any storage media, protecting their budgets, supply chains, and AI roadmaps for years to come.”

DDN Delivers Full AI Performance on Any Media Mix
Unlike competitive systems that rely exclusively on high-end NVMe to feed GPUs, DDN’s EXA and Infinia platforms deliver identical performance across a mix of high-performance SSDs, lower-cost SSDs, and HDD tiers. This media-agnostic architecture removes dependence on expensive flash while ensuring 90-98% GPU utilization for training, HPC, analytics, and inference.

Key capabilities include:

Media-agnostic parallel architecture that maintains performance regardless of SSD type
Intelligent multi-tiering across NVMe, SSD, and HDD
Ultra-low IO amplification for longer drive life and reduced provisioning requirements
Advanced metadata parallelism ensuring GPU feeding performance at the largest scales
Deep optimization for NVIDIA DGX,GB 200, Spectrum-X, BlueField, and NIMs

With these innovations, organizations can achieve the same or better AI outcomes while reducing high-end SSD requirements by 35-65%, cutting total storage CAPEX by 40-70%, and lowering OPEX by 30-60%.

“DDN Data Intelligence platform provides scalability and high-performance storage, keeping up with the massive AI workloads. The combination of low-latency access and high bandwidth, and the parallel file system capabilities enable our customers to have faster training of their models and reduce bottlenecks and optimize their AI workflow,” said Louis Xu, head of AI Cloud, Bitdeer AI.

A Critical Breakthrough for Hyperscalers, Sovereign AI Projects, and Enterprise AI Adoption
AI data centers are expanding globally as hyperscalers, national cloud initiatives, and enterprises race to deploy generative AI, autonomous systems, digital twins, cybersecurity analytics, and other accelerated workloads. NAND shortages and supply chain volatility threaten these buildouts.

Significant Benefits Across Industries

Financial Services: Accelerate quant models and risk simulations while lowering storage cost up to 70%
Life Sciences: Expand genomics, cryo-EM, and drug discovery pipelines without absorbing SSD price inflation
Autonomous Driving & Robotics: Reduce petascale ingest and training storage cost by up to 80% with no performance loss
Manufacturing, Digital Twin, and Omniverse: Support massive model and simulation growth at predictable cost
Public Sector & Sovereign AI: Multi-year architectural stability that eliminates supply chain risk and accelerates strategic AI timelines

Strengthening the AI Ecosystem
DDN’s architecture amplifies the performance and value of the tech stack across training, inference, and simulation:

Faster token gen
Higher GPU utilization
More efficient deployment of NVIDIAGB 200 systems and Spectrum-X powered AI fabrics
Greater price-performance efficiency for DGX Cloud and NIM-based services

These capabilities help partners deliver more tokens per watt, per $, and per data center rack, enabling faster time-to-insight and higher economic return.