$BLZE: The boring backup company that accidentally became an AI infrastructure play
Backblaze used to be the boring cloud backup company your IT department installed and then forgot existed.
Now they’re storing multi-exabyte datasets for AI companies and GPU clouds.
Market cap is still around $1B.
Why I bought this thing
Q2 numbers:
- Revenue: $42.7M, +18%
- B2 Cloud Storage revenue: +34%
- B2 ARR: +39%
- Adjusted EBITDA margin: 30%
- Positive adjusted free cash flow
- Full-year guidance raised to $172–174M
- Management expects 40%+ B2 growth in 2027
The old backup business is basically sitting in the corner collecting cash while B2 does all the actual growing.
The CoreWeave deal
Backblaze signed a $335M multi-year agreement with CoreWeave for several exabytes of storage.
For context, BLZE expects around $173M in total revenue this year.
So this one contract is worth almost two years of current company revenue.
This isn’t one of those:
CoreWeave is committing actual money, actual capacity and actual infrastructure.
Yes, CoreWeave also got warrants for up to 4.19M shares at $7.60, so there’s some dilution.
Whatever. I’d rather get diluted because the company landed a $335M customer than get diluted because management needed another office ping-pong table.
It’s not only CoreWeave
This quarter Backblaze also signed:
- its largest-ever B2 Overdrive deal with a frontier AI model developer
- roughly another $1M ARR expansion with a data-training customer
- a six-figure deal with a conversational AI company
ARR from customers spending more than $50K per year grew 67%.
That’s the part I care about.
CoreWeave might not be some random one-off whale. It might be the first proof that Backblaze can sell this thing to the rest of the AI ecosystem.
What do they actually do?
AI companies produce an ungodly amount of:
- training data
- model checkpoints
- generated video
- generated images
- audio
- inference outputs
- whatever other digital sludge Jensen creates next
GPU clusters cost a fortune.
If the storage system can’t deliver data quickly enough, the GPUs sit there doing nothing while the company burns money.
Backblaze’s pitch is basically:
Their B2 Overdrive product offers up to 1 Tbps throughput for large AI workloads.
They’re also pushing Powered by Backblaze, which lets smaller cloud providers white-label B2 and sell it as their own storage service.
So instead of fighting every neocloud, Backblaze can become the storage plumbing underneath them.
Nobody gets excited about plumbing until the entire building needs it.
Valuation
At around a $1B market cap and roughly $173M revenue guidance, BLZE trades around 5–6x forward revenue.
Not exactly cigarette-butt value after the recent run.
But it also doesn’t seem insane for a company with:
- 39% B2 ARR growth
- 40%+ expected B2 growth in 2027
- 30% adjusted EBITDA margin
- positive adjusted FCF
- a $335M CoreWeave contract
- several additional AI customers
I’m not claiming this becomes a $10B company by Friday.
To reach $10B, it probably needs $700M–$1B+ in revenue and several more CoreWeave-sized deals.
But it doesn’t need to reach $10B for the stock to work.
It just needs the market to stop valuing it like some dying backup company and start valuing it like an actual AI infrastructure supplier.
What could go wrong?
CoreWeave represents most of the current contracted backlog, the rollout could be delayed, and the company still needs to prove it can execute.
But honestly, if the entire AI infrastructure buildout collapses, BLZE won’t be the only ticker getting sent to the shadow realm.
NVDA, CoreWeave, neoclouds, data centers, power stocks and half of WSB will all be behind the Wendy’s dumpster together.
And if Backblaze specifically screws this up?
Fine. I’ll become a long-term investor and tell everyone I always believed in the fundamentals.
What I’m watching
- Another major neocloud deal
- CoreWeave revenue appearing in quarterly results
- B2 growth remaining above 30–40%
- Margins holding during the infrastructure rollout
- More large AI customers
TL;DR
BLZE currently has:
- Around $1B market cap
- $335M CoreWeave agreement
- 39% B2 ARR growth
- 40%+ B2 growth outlook for 2027
- 30% adjusted EBITDA margin
- Positive adjusted free cash flow
- Multiple additional AI customers
If CoreWeave ramps and they sign one or two more large infrastructure customers, this probably doesn’t remain a $1B company.
If it goes to hell, I guess I own Dropbox for GPU nerds until 2034.
Not financial advice. I read three SEC filings and now believe I understand cloud infrastructure.
Posted Aug 4, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC