Wasabi launches AI unit & names Mukherjee to lead it

Wasabi has created a dedicated AI business and appointed Pinaki Mukherjee to lead it as Senior Vice President and General Manager. The unit will focus on AI customers whose data it already stores at scale.

The cloud storage provider said the new business will concentrate on strategy, partnerships and go-to-market efforts for AI labs, generative AI start-ups and neocloud compute providers. Mukherjee will lead those efforts from Silicon Valley.

Wasabi already stores hundreds of petabytes of AI data worldwide and is positioning storage as a more important part of AI infrastructure spending as training and inference workloads increase the volume of data that must be read, moved and retained.

Mukherjee joins with more than 20 years of experience across semiconductors, storage and AI infrastructure. His previous roles included senior business strategy and corporate development positions at Fungible, Druva and Western Digital, as well as work on semiconductor strategy and AI infrastructure engagements at Alvarez & Marsal.

His track record includes more than USD $2 billion in partnership-driven revenue and more than USD $10 billion in strategic mergers, acquisitions and investment outcomes, according to the company.

Storage demand

Wasabi's move reflects a wider shift in the AI market, where storage has become a larger budget item as companies run repeated training cycles on the same datasets and move data continuously between storage systems and GPU computing environments. That has also increased scrutiny of cloud pricing models, particularly when customers face extra charges to move or access data.

Wasabi argues that avoiding vendor lock-in is becoming a strategic concern for AI operators that want flexibility to move between infrastructure providers. It says its approach lets customers move data between environments without egress or API fees.

According to Marty Falaro, President and Chief Operating Officer of Wasabi, the new unit is intended to deepen the company's position in that market. "Mukherjee has a track record of driving the kind of high-value partnerships that move markets, and that's exactly what this moment requires," Falaro said. "AI workloads are pushing storage demand to a scale we've never seen, and Mukherjee is the right person to build the partnerships that extend Wasabi's position as the industry's choice for cloud storage, at the exact moment inference is reshaping what that storage needs to do."

Scale and reach

Wasabi said it has spent a decade building out its storage infrastructure and now operates 16 storage regions worldwide. It also works with 18,000 channel partners and has raised more than USD $700 million in funding.

It linked that footprint to its AI push, saying the amount of data used by autonomous software agents and AI systems is making cost predictability more important. In its view, workloads that repeatedly read, write and transfer data can become more expensive when providers charge separately for API calls and data movement.

Wasabi also cited recent customer deployments as evidence of demand. An image and video generation lab migrated 175 petabytes from a hyperscale cloud provider within months, while a robotics data consortium stored multiple petabytes and projected annual savings of more than JPY 100 million.

New leadership

Mukherjee said the company's focus will be on helping customers avoid dependence on a single cloud ecosystem. "AI customers don't need another hyperscaler, they need the freedom to move their data wherever their workloads take them, without egress fees, API fees, or lock-in dictating their architecture," Mukherjee said. "Wasabi is already the independent choice that innovative enterprises, neoclouds, and data platforms turn to as they scale beyond what any single hyperscaler ecosystem can offer. I'm looking forward to building the ecosystem that scales that freedom across the AI ecosystem."

The appointment gives Wasabi a senior executive dedicated to a market segment drawing increased investment across the infrastructure industry. As AI developers and cloud providers seek to manage larger stores of training and inference data, vendors across storage, networking and compute are reshaping product and partnership strategies around those workloads.

Wasabi said the new business will bring together its AI strategy, partner development and commercial activity under one structure as it seeks more business from labs, start-ups and neocloud operators already storing data on its platform.