DDN's flamboyant cofounder joins the billionaire ranks as AI fuels 28-year-old data firm
What's the deal? Alex Bouzari, the 65-year-old French-Iranian cofounder and chief executive officer of data storage company DDN, has become a billionaire. The Chatsworth, California-based firm has managed data storage for the world's fastest supercomputers since 1998.
What's the endgame? DDN sells super-fast hard drives and uses software to break enormous files into pieces spread across thousands of drives at once. "We enable [data] highways to be filled with cars, without congestion, where every lane is full all the time," Bouzari says.
Why now? The world's fastest supercomputers can run more than a quintillion operations a second — but only if fed data fast enough. Historically, the hard drives holding that data were the chokepoint, the problem DDN was built to solve.
The signal: A 28-year-old storage company is emerging as an unlikely winner of the AI boom, underscoring how demand for supercomputing has revived the fortunes of old-school infrastructure players.
Read more: Forbes
Image credit: U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command
