Industry Leaders Combine Forces to Solve AI-Related Data Challenges

SNIA, a not-for-profit global organization for technologies related to handling and optimizing data, today announced Storage.AI™, an open standards project for efficient data services related to AI workloads. Storage.AI will focus on industry-standard, non-proprietary, and neutral approaches to solving AI-related data problems to optimize the performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of AI workloads.

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Storage.AI: Improving storage technologies for all AI workloads

Initial industry leaders who have signed on to Storage.AI include AMD, Cisco, DDN, Dell, IBM, Intel, KIOXIA, Microchip, Micron, NetApp, Pure Storage, Samsung, Seagate, Solidigm, and WEKA. In addition to SNIA’s substantial membership, the project will work to build broad ecosystem support with SNIA’s partners, including UEC, NVM Express®, OCP, OFA, DMTF, SPEC, and others.

AI workloads are extraordinarily complex and constrained by issues related to latency, space, power and cooling, memory, and cost. Addressing these problems through an open industry initiative is the fastest path to optimization and adoption. SNIA’s 25+ year track record of developing industry standards, together with its technical accomplishments to accelerate, store, unify, and optimize the compute, movement, and performance of data, makes it uniquely positioned to lead the SNIA Storage.AI data project.

"The unprecedented demands of AI require a holistic view of the data pipeline, from storage and memory to networking and processing,” said Dr. J Metz, SNIA Chair. “No single company can solve these challenges alone. SNIA’s Storage.AI provides the essential, vendor-neutral framework for the industry to coordinate a wide range of data services, building the efficient, non-proprietary solutions needed to accelerate AI for everyone."

The Storage.AI project will create an open ecosystem for efficient data services to address the most difficult challenges related to AI workloads, closing current gaps in processing and accessing data. The founding members share common goals. For more information, visit snia.ai.

Industry Response

AMD

“The enterprise technologies powering today’s most demanding AI workloads are only as effective as the data they can access,” said Robert Hormuth, corporate vice president, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD. “As a member of Storage.AI, we’re excited to collaborate with other leaders to give the industry a neutral, open path to fix data bottlenecks and unlock true AI performance.”

Cisco

"Storage networking has long been a foundational pillar of our customers' digital infrastructure. As AI continues to expand across the enterprise, integrating robust storage solutions with AI workloads has become increasingly important. In today’s AI-driven landscape, data sets our customers apart, and the performance and reliability of that data are essential to realizing the full benefits of AI.” Jeremy Foster, SVP and GM, Cisco Compute.

DDN

"As AI continues to reshape every industry, the demand for open, scalable, and intelligent data infrastructure has never been greater,” said Santosh Erram, VP of Public Cloud Alliances at DDN. “At DDN, we’re proud to support SNIA’s Storage.AI initiative—an important step toward fostering collaboration, driving interoperability, and setting open standards that enable the AI ecosystem to thrive. By working together, we can unlock faster innovation and more meaningful outcomes for customers and partners across the AI landscape."

Dell

"To fully realize the potential of AI, enterprises must transform raw data into structured, governed knowledge. Storage and Data Engines play a pivotal role in this journey—powering data pipelines from training and continuous learning to agentic outcomes. These engines must evolve rapidly, embracing innovation across flash media, drives, networking, compute and foundational software. Dell Technologies is proud to collaborate with SNIA to advance the technologies and standards that make this transformation possible,” said Rajesh Rajaraman, CTO and VP Dell Storage, Data and Cyber Resilience.

IBM

“Effective data management is fundamental to the performance, quality, and cost-efficiency of AI projects. AI-optimized storage plays a critical role in enabling this, and the industry urgently needs a consistent methodology and interface for consuming AI-optimized storage. IBM is proud to collaborate with SNIA in advancing these standards and solutions,” said Vincent Hsu, IBM Fellow, CTO and VP for IBM Storage.

Intel

“AI workloads are redefining the boundaries of compute and data infrastructure. Storage.AI offers a critical, vendor-neutral foundation that unites innovation across the ecosystem from storage architecture to memory hierarchy, helping to ensure scalable, efficient solutions, purpose-built for the AI era,” said Ronak Singhal, Intel Senior Fellow, Xeon Products.

Microchip

“Microchip is pleased to support Storage.AI, the new open standard project under SNIA focused on optimizing AI data solutions,” said Brian McCarson, corporate vice president of Microchip’s data center solutions business unit. “Advancing features and capabilities in both our storage and flash controllers is key to providing solutions for complex AI-related data workloads across both Large Language Model and Inference specific hardware architectures.”

Micron

“AI workloads demand unprecedented levels of data throughput, efficiency and scalability,” said Karthik Ganesan, Fellow, Storage Solutions Architecture at Micron. “As the leaders in memory and storage products for AI workloads, enabling standards to ensure interoperability is critical to our ability to stay on the leading edge of delivering new solutions like our PCIe Gen6 SSDs. By building Storage.AI together using an open approach, we can speed up innovation and create the data infrastructure AI needs to thrive.”

NetApp

"AI workloads demand unprecedented efficiency, scalability, and performance from storage solutions,” said Ed Fiore, Vice President and Fellow, Chief Systems Architect at NetApp. “NetApp is committed to delivering innovative storage technologies that optimize AI data pipelines, ensuring seamless data access and management. By joining SNIA’s Storage.AI initiative, we are excited to collaborate with industry leaders to develop open standards that drive interoperability and unlock the full potential of AI. Together, we will accelerate AI advancements and create a robust ecosystem that benefits everyone.”

Pure Storage

“Storage.AI highlights the role of data infrastructure and management as organizations evolve, interoperate, and scale for an AI future,” said Rob Lee, Pure Storage CTO. “Pure Storage has long led the storage industry in championing open standards and deep ecosystem integration. As the industry tackles AI-related data challenges to drive real outcomes, Pure Storage sees the foundation in seamless data movement across environments, policy-aware storage orchestration, and a clear focus on ensuring data sovereignty is never a strategic landmine. Artificial intelligence is only as powerful as the data storage platform beneath it, and the future of AI demands modern, scalable infrastructure that is built for flexibility, performance, and governance.”

Samsung

"As AI workloads require faster and more efficient data processing, a collaborative approach is required to address the storage challenges that come with it,” said Leno Park, Vice President of Storage Solutions Product Planning, Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to join the SNIA Storage.AI initiative and contribute our expertise in memory and storage solutions to help develop industry-standard, non-proprietary approaches that optimize AI performance and efficiency.”

Seagate

“Hard drive storage is critical to unlocking the full value of data in AI workloads—delivering scalable, efficient and cost-effective solutions that support global innovation,” said Jason Feist, Senior Vice President of Cloud Marketing at Seagate Technology. “By advancing open standards through Storage.AI, Seagate is helping to enable infrastructure growth that meets the increased demand for performance required by the next-gen technology ecosystem.”

Solidigm

“Solidigm is excited to be a founding supporter of Storage.AI, the next big data project from SNIA,” said Greg Matson, Senior Vice President and Head of Products and Marketing, Solidigm. “Data is the fuel of the AI engine, and we have found, working with our customers, that SSDs are ideal for the AI pipeline—helping reduce power consumption and physical footprint with greater capacity. We look forward to working with SNIA and our industry partners to help advance AI and storage together in this evolving ecosystem."

WEKA

“AI is pushing infrastructure to its limits, creating efficiency, power, and scale challenges that require industry-wide solutions. Building on SNIA's legacy of advancing storage standards, WEKA is excited to join the Storage.AI initiative to help develop open standards that will benefit the entire AI ecosystem,” said Ajay Singh, chief product officer at WEKA. “We've long believed that AI needs a new class of data architecture—one that scales with the workload, without compromising performance or resiliency. By working with stakeholders across the entire infrastructure stack, we can better address these core technical challenges and unlock AI's potential to transform the future of innovation.”

Join Storage.AI

The power and impact of industry cooperation in developing open standards are proven. Technical work is beginning now. Companies and industry organizations interested in participating in the groundbreaking project should contact storage.ai@snia.org

About SNIA

SNIA is a not-for-profit global organization made up of corporations, universities, startups, and individuals. The members collaborate to develop and promote vendor-neutral architectures as well as international standards and specifications. SNIA promotes technologies related to the storage, transport, optimization of infrastructure, acceleration, format, and protection of data.

Follow SNIA at https://www.snia.org/news-events

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The Storage.AI project will create an open ecosystem for efficient data services to address the most difficult challenges related to AI workloads, closing current gaps in processing and accessing data.