San Jose's NetApp completes purchase of British AI storage startup PEAK:AIO
The deal, first announced in September, gives NetApp technology meant to keep huge AI chip clusters fed with data.
NetApp, the San Jose data storage company, said Monday that it has finished buying PEAK:AIO, a small British company that makes storage software for AI computers. NetApp did not say how much it paid.
NetApp first announced the deal on Sept. 25. The purchase needed the usual closing steps and government approvals, which are now complete, according to the company.
Who is PEAK:AIO
PEAK:AIO is based in Manchester, England. It makes software that turns ordinary servers into very fast storage for AI work. NetApp said its technology grew out of work with research groups including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University. Its customers have included Britain's National Health Service AI program and the Oxford Robotics Institute, according to NetApp.
Why storage matters for AI
Training an AI model means feeding enormous amounts of data to thousands of expensive chips called GPUs. If the storage system can't deliver data fast enough, those chips sit idle, wasting money.
Part of the problem is "metadata," the information about each file, such as its name, size and location. When millions of chips ask for billions of files at once, the system that tracks metadata can become a traffic jam. PEAK:AIO's approach separates the metadata from the data itself, so each can grow on its own, NetApp said.
NetApp plans to combine that technology with ONTAP, the software that runs its storage systems, and with NetApp Novus, a high-speed storage product. The goal is storage that can hold trillions of files for AI cloud companies and firms that rent out GPUs.
The AI factory is only as productive as its data pipeline.
What it means
NetApp, founded in 1992, is one of Silicon Valley's longtime storage makers. The deal is a bet that AI cloud providers will want storage built for their scale rather than older designs. PEAK:AIO was privately held, so there is no public shareholder payout. Neither company has said whether any jobs will be cut.
Source: NetApp news releases, Sept. 25 and Nov. 2, 2026.