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As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave his keynote address at the company's annual GTC conference to an audience of roughly 17,000 people in San Jose, California, last week, dozens of companies sat on the edge of their seats to find out if they'd get a mention. Some had a glimpse of the slides ahead of time, but no one knew for certain until the words came out of Huang's mouth.
DataDirect Networks, or DDN, was one of the lucky ones to leave the arena happy. Huang named the company alongside Dell, HP Enterprise, Hitachi, and IBM. But while those firms have enjoyed broader name recognition in the tech world for decades, DDN was invited on the rocket ship that is Nvidia just a few years ago — and everything changed.
DDN makes hardware, but more importantly software that allows GPU users to access their stored data fast. It cuts down on latency, which is the industry term for lag in AI systems that can delay, for example, the answer to a question asked of a chatbot like ChatGPT.
When Nvidia sells $100 worth of GPUs, DDN's opportunity is $5-10 dollars.
"You have to have the right amount of performance, reliability, and stability to extract your data at full speed, real-time, to feed the GPUs," Paul Bloch, DDN's 64-year-old President, told Business Insider.
The company has been working with Nvidia for about eight years. Before that, it served the stable, but much smaller industry of supercomputers for decades.
Bloch and CEO Alex Bouzari are fixtures of the supercomputing world. Before the AI boom, top research universities, government labs, and the oil and gas industry knew them well. But mainstream data centers didn't need them. They do now.
"For the very first time, your storage system will be GPU-accelerated," Huang said at GTC.
DDN
As data sets grow larger and AI is used at scale for data-heavy applications like real-time video, Bloch can see a day when the company scales independently of Nvidia.
"All of a sudden it's much easier to deliver the value in AI because we've already done it in the past with similar market,' Bloch said. "That's why the success of the company has gone exponential."
DDN has found a new gear in the age of AI. Conversations, fixes, new features, and deals that used to take weeks and months now take days. And Bloch and his team are learning to work at Jensen Huang's pace — what he calls the "speed of light."
"Jensen's emails are fantastic. They are 10 words or less," Bloch said.
Moving into the era of AI has taken some adjustments, but today, DDN and its competitors are essential to the parallel computing that enables AI. When a company seeks to set up a GPU cloud, it has to have a version of DDN's tech. And DDN is part of Nvidia's reference architecture, which is the recommended setup for maximal GPU performance.
Not all of Nvidia's customers choose to use these instructions, but the mere fact has brought DDN new customers. Hyperscalers have traditionally preferred to use their own recipes of parts and players in their data centers, but Bloch said that in the era of Nvidia's Blackwell, they are starting to come around.
Now it's preparing for a blockbuster third decade. In January, the company raised $300 million in growth funding from Blackstone at a $5 billion valuation, and Bloch got a congratulatory email from Huang at 6:30 a.m. the morning of the announcement, he said.
"DDN does not need the money, per se," Bloch said. "We're profitable. We're EBITDA positive, we're growing very quickly."
What he wants, though, is access to the C-suites that come with a Blackstone affiliation. DDN used to sell through researchers and developers — after all, the technology was so niche that it was far below top executives' notice. Now, AI infrastructure is one of the most important expenditures a company can make, and decisions around it are scrutinized at the highest levels.
DDN has received acquisition offers over the years, but Bloch said the company is his and Bouzari's "life's work" and they stay independent by choice.
"We are control freaks," Bloch said, adding that he sees two to five years more of break-neck AI infrastructure buildout.
"I'm not even sure it's going to stop," he said.
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Nvidia at GTC 2025 announced a new lineup of “AI personal supercomputers” powered by the company’s Grace Blackwell chip platform. Jensen Huang, the semiconductor company’s founder and CEO, unveiled the two new machines, DGX Spark (previously called Project Digits) and DGX Station, during his keynote on Tuesday. The computers will allow users to prototype, fine-tune, […]
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It looks like a Pebble, it works like a Pebble, but don’t call it a Pebble. Eric Migicovsky, the original creator of the Pebble smartwatch, just unveiled two new smartwatches — called the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2. These spiritual successors to the Pebble smartwatches are available for preorder, costing $149 and […]
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Google is partnering with Taiwan’s MediaTek to develop the next version of its AI chips, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), set for production next year, according to a report from The Information, citing three sources familiar with the matter. Despite this […]
The post Google partners with MediaTek to build cheaper AI chips, joining tech giants moving to reduce their reliance on Nvidia first appeared on Tech Startups.
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SAP Labs
If industry leaders' forecasts hold true, 2030 will usher in the decade of quantum computing, causing an explosion of innovation much like machine learning and artificial intelligence have over the last decade. Yaad Oren, a managing director at SAP Labs, one of the world's biggest software companies, shared how to get into this growing field.
Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field involving elements from computer science, physics, and mathematics. It leverages quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than is possible using classical computers, with researchers optimistic it could revolutionize medicine, data privacy, and more. Advancement in the field relies both on hardware research and software and algorithmic development — and the quantum business is booming.
According to research by Boston Consulting Group, the industry attracted $1.2 billion from venture capitalists in 2023 despite a 50% drop in overall tech investments that year. BCG projects that quantum computing will create between $450 billion and $850 billion of economic value globally and sustain a $90-$170 billion market for hardware and software providers by the year 2040.
LinkedIn shows that the salary bands for jobs in quantum computing range from $150,000 on the low end and balloon well past $500,000 a year, depending on the role and company. So what does it take to break into this growing — and lucrative — field?
Oren is the managing director of SAP Labs US and the global head of its business technology innovation team. SAP, the world's largest non-American software company by revenue, is a leader in cloud-based quantum computing.
He told Business Insider that recruiters in the field look for curiosity more than anything else.
"Of course, we need expertise — and quantum is a very deep science and practice that requires a lot of knowledge — but if you follow the industry, you see there are also many disruptions going with quantum," Oren said. "We're definitely looking for change agents and curiosity is needed because, I mean, the industry is not sure at all that the current quantum technology we have now will be the winning architecture. It's like building a building from the ground floor."
With so much of the final architecture of the quantum landscape still undecided, the companies advancing the technology — including IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — are reliant on new ideas, and researchers resilient enough to handle failure, Oren said.
"Some projects will be successful, some of them will fail," Oren said. "This is why I think many young people coming to the industry have the ability to be change agents and challenge the paradigm that we have today."
For those looking to break into the industry, expertise in developing algorithms, hardware engineering, cryptography, and data science are skills in high demand. There's a lot of overlap with those working now in artificial intelligence, and the two technologies will feed off each other. Still, a wide range of engineering skills and computer science is required to fulfill the promise of quantum computing — and workers who manage to snag one of these in-demand quantum roles should be prepared to wear multiple hats.
"The average day is very diverse at the moment because the field is maturing very fast, and there's so much to do," Oren said.
A typical day for a quantum expert at SAP Labs starts with conducting research, the complexity of which varies depending on the project being tackled. However, the company's researchers also partner with academics, work on public-funded projects with various governments, and meet with business clients to identify and address their needs.
"But because there are so many stakeholders and interests, the diversity of what we do and who we work with is very, very interesting," Oren said. "Since there's so much interest, it's a very, very interesting time to be in quantum — not only in the lab in the university, which is great."
If he had one suggestion for a newcomer entering the quantum computing field, it'd be to develop expertise in adjacent fields like quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and quantum chemistry — because, unlike their classical applications, working with quantum is an entirely different language and set of skills.
"Quantum is working on exponential complexity, which means, if you have many variables, it's not a linear growth of complexity — it's an exponential one," Oren said. But with that complexity, he added, comes "so many opportunities to build."
After reporting in January that Apple is adding an “Air” option to its iPhone lineup, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is offering more details about the upcoming slimmer iPhone. The iPhone 17 Air will launch this fall, Gurman says — and like the MacBook Air, it will be thinner than standard models, while combining high-end and low-end […]
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Amazon Echo users will no longer have the option to process their Alexa requests locally, which means all of their voice recordings will be sent to the company’s cloud. Ars Technica reports that on Friday, Amazon sent an email to customers who have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo smart speakers and […]
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Google announced on Thursday that Android phones will soon support Auracast, a new Bluetooth technology that uses a phone to enable a direct connection from hearing aids to audio broadcasts in noisy environments. With Auracast, compatible hearing aids and earbuds can receive direct audio streams, such as a PA system at a train station or […]
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