NetApp to Acquire PEAK:AIO to Advance Scalable AI Infrastructure Architecture

NetApp has announced its intent to acquire PEAK:AIO, a UK-based pioneer in next-generation metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file systems, in a move aimed at accelerating the company's AI infrastructure roadmap. The planned acquisition is expected to augment NetApp's metadata services and parallel namespace innovation, helping AI clouds scale shared storage alongside rapidly growing GPU clusters.

The deal reflects a broader industry challenge: as AI becomes embedded in every enterprise workload, traditional storage architectures are proving inadequate for the unprecedented scale, concurrency, and performance demands of AI factories, AI clouds, and next-generation data-intensive applications. NetApp is building an architecture that disaggregates metadata from data and enables metadata services to scale independently, creating a foundation capable of supporting trillions of files, exabyte-scale environments, and massively parallel workloads.

PEAK:AIO's technology originated from collaborations with leading research institutions, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University, and was designed to address some of the industry's most demanding data-intensive computing challenges. The company's platform delivers high-performance AI storage from a single server to exabytes on any industry-standard hardware, and is deployed at organizations including Los Alamos National Laboratory, NHS AIDE, Oxford Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Liverpool, University of Strathclyde MediForge Hub, and the Zoological Society of London.

"AI clouds need high-performance shared storage that can scale alongside growing GPU clusters while maintaining the resilience, security, and operational simplicity organizations depend on," said George Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at NetApp. "With PEAK:AIO, we are delivering on our vision for a new generation of AI infrastructure that combines scalable metadata services with the proven foundation of ONTAP to help customers maximize infrastructure efficiency and support AI at hyperscale cloud."

Mark Klarzynski, Chief Technology Officer and Founder at PEAK:AIO, said the two companies connected through a shared belief that the AI era demands a fundamentally new approach to data infrastructure. "What excites us most about joining NetApp is the opportunity to pair our culture of innovation with the reach, scale, and customer trust of a global leader," he said.

By combining PEAK:AIO's specialized metadata innovations with NetApp ONTAP software, customers are expected to benefit from a differentiated architecture that preserves the resilience, security, and operational maturity of ONTAP while introducing a new level of scalability for AI workloads. The architecture is intended to support trillions of files and multi-exabyte deployments, combining scalable metadata services, standards-based parallel NFS access, and ONTAP as the resilient data foundation to help reduce data-related GPU stalls, improve infrastructure efficiency, and accelerate AI innovation. The planned integration will also create a clear evolution path for existing ONTAP customers.

The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.