Enterprise Data Storage Systems

NetApp has been named an official partner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, expanding its existing relationship with the National Football League, for which it already serves as the Official Intelligent Data Infrastructure Partner. Under the new partnership, the Buccaneers will use NetApp Keystone, a subscription-based service providing performance, intelligent data management and high availability across data centers and cloud environments, to support the fan experience at Raymond James Stadium on game days and across the team's digital platforms. Buccaneers chief commercial officer Atul Khosla said reliable and secure access to data is an important part of the game-day experience. The deal follows the Buccaneers' first regular-season game of the 2026 season against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sept. 13. On its first-quarter fiscal 2027 earnings call, NetApp said it closed approximately 350 AI and data lake modernization deals during the quarter, and it also signed a significant agreement with Samsung Electronics to support its EDA environment and AI Center of Excellence.

CoreWeave is expanding its capabilities for next-generation AI workloads with the deployment of multi-rack NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 clusters on CoreWeave Cloud, alongside two new capabilities for its AI Object Storage platform: cross-region write acceleration and a lower-cost Archive tier. The multi-rack Vera Rubin NVL72 deployment allows hundreds of NVIDIA Rubin GPUs to operate as a single scale-out cluster, with each NVL72 rack combining 72 Rubin GPUs with 36 Vera CPUs, NVIDIA NVLink 6, ConnectX-9 SuperNICs and BlueField-4 DPUs, connected across racks using NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and automated through CoreWeave's Mission Control platform. CoreWeave says its Local Object Transport Accelerator caches data locally and can reduce latency by up to 8x compared with traditional storage-cluster reads while delivering up to 7 GB/s of throughput per GPU, while the new cross-region write capability lets customers write data locally as CoreWeave replicates it to another region in the background. The company faces intensifying competition in the AI cloud market from Microsoft and Nebius Group N.V., which plans to invest £1.7 billion in U.K. AI infrastructure and expects connected power capacity to reach roughly 800 MW to 1 GW by 2026 end. CoreWeave shares have gained 24.4% year to date against the Internet Software industry's fall of 0.6%, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for CRWV's earnings for the current year has been revised downward over the past 60 days.

Apple is considering building enterprise servers powered by its M-series Ultra processors, according to The Information, potentially pairing those chips with networking equipment from Nvidia. The servers would reportedly be sold to businesses rather than used only inside Apple's own data centers, putting two very different chip strategies inside the same machine. Apple has spent years designing processors to reduce its dependence on outside suppliers, while Nvidia has become the backbone of much of the AI data-center market. Such a move would push Apple silicon beyond Macs, iPhones and its own computing ecosystem into the larger enterprise infrastructure market, where it would compete more directly with Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro. The project is still under consideration, so there is no guarantee Apple moves forward.

CoreWeave shares rose about 3% Wednesday after the AI cloud provider brought Nvidia's multi-rack Vera Rubin NVL72 system online, connecting hundreds of next-generation Rubin GPUs into a single scale-out cluster. The milestone strengthens CoreWeave's pitch as one of the earliest cloud platforms able to commercialize Nvidia's newest AI hardware, an important differentiator as competition intensifies across AI infrastructure. The announcement builds on CoreWeave's June disclosure that it was the first AI cloud provider to bring a Vera Rubin NVL72 system online. A single NVL72 rack combines 72 Rubin GPUs with 36 Vera CPUs, and CoreWeave's multi-rack configuration links hundreds of accelerators using Nvidia's Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, allowing customers to treat a much larger pool of compute as one cluster. CoreWeave also introduced upgrades to its AI Object Storage platform, including cross-region write acceleration and a new Archive tier, with its Local Object Transport Accelerator able to reduce latency by as much as eight times through managed caching.

Bridgewater Associates opened new positions in two AI stocks during the second quarter, according to billionaire Ray Dalio's fund's 13F filings. The fund bought about 635,000 shares of ServiceNow worth roughly $63 million, a 0.26% portfolio weight, and about 999,000 shares of Nutanix worth roughly $51 million, a 0.21% weight. Nutanix ended fiscal 2026 with recurring revenue of $2.55 billion, up 16%, and added more than 3,000 new customers during the year, though its stock is down 11% over the past year. Management said external storage support drove several seven-figure deals in the fourth quarter and expects it to be the largest single growth contributor in fiscal 2027, while Nutanix has also been picking up business from customers leaving Broadcom's VMware after price increases and licensing changes. Revenue growth is slowing, from 18% in fiscal 2025 to 12% in fiscal 2026, with guidance for 12% again in fiscal 2027, and server shortages are expected to last all of fiscal 2027. The stock trades around 29 times forward earnings against a technology sector median near 22, with enterprise value to sales at about 5.3 against a sector median of 3.5.

Dell Technologies shares jumped more than 11% on September 11 after RBC Capital Markets initiated coverage of the company with an Outperform rating and a price target of $640. RBC analyst David Paige wrote that Dell is showing no signs of slowing and remains well positioned to benefit from a multi-year AI infrastructure spending cycle, calling its best-in-class supply chain a competitive moat. Dell holds a record $95 billion in unfulfilled server orders in its backlog and recognized $16.4 billion of AI server revenue in its second quarter. At the start of September, the company reported better-than-expected Q2 results and lifted its fiscal full-year revenue outlook by $25 billion to $192 billion, which would represent nearly 70% revenue growth over the previous year. Operating cash flow declined to $2.2 billion from $2.5 billion a year earlier even as net income more than tripled to $4.1 billion, and inventories doubled since the end of January to $21.3 billion as the company stockpiles components to meet its backlog. Hedge fund interest rose to 77 holders in the second quarter of 2026 from 72 in the first quarter, while short interest stood at 4.88% of the float as of August 31, and the stock trades at about 22 times forward earnings.

Micron Technology announced the successful demonstration of the world's first 512GB DDR5 module on multiple server platforms, an ultra-dense RDIMM built on the company's advanced vertical interconnect packaging. The module stacks DRAM dies interconnected by through-silicon vias to maximize density, enabling up to 12TB of DDR5 DRAM in a single 24-slot dual-socket server, and delivers speeds up to 9,200 MT/s while cutting operating power by more than 60% compared with four 128GB RDIMMs. AMD and Intel are both actively validating the module across next-generation server platforms. Micron said the 512GB RDIMM can deliver up to 1.4 times higher performance than 256GB DDR5 configurations on memory-bound workloads such as Spark SVM-based data analytics, and offers throughput and concurrency gains for databases and caching platforms including RocksDB and Redis. Micron expects 512GB RDIMMs to enter volume production sometime in the second half of 2027, aligned to customer needs.

On the evening of September 14, multiple listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges issued important announcements. Xiangshan Co. plans to acquire 100% equity in Wuluo Zhihui through a combination of share issuance and cash payment, with the total transaction consideration tentatively set at 800 million yuan. After the transaction, the company will add AI computing equipment business to its existing auto parts operations. Jintian Titanium Industry plans to raise no more than 300 million yuan through a private placement, while Aoride plans to raise no more than 868 million yuan for projects including the construction of a western domestic server cluster. Runze Technology plans to apply to financial institutions for additional credit facilities totaling no more than 50 billion yuan on top of its existing credit lines to increase investment in the AIDC sector. Chitianhua's wholly owned subsidiary Anjia Mining received approval from the Guizhou Provincial Energy Bureau for the expansion of the Huaqiu No. 2 Mine, with production capacity to be raised from the current 600,000 tons per year to 1.5 million tons per year. TCL Smart Home's second-phase project at its Thailand production base, with an annual capacity of 1.4 million refrigerators, has been completed and entered trial production. Lianke Technology plans to invest about 1 billion yuan to build a silica-carbon black circular economy integrated project in the Suez Canal Economic Zone in Egypt. In addition, Xingyun Technology disclosed that as of September 8, 2026, its five-year long-term computing power framework orders on hand reached 16.004 billion yuan. Huazhijie is planning to acquire 100% equity in Suzhou Geli Ming Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., and its shares will be suspended from trading starting September 15.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company shares have climbed more than 120% over the past year, with the stock rallying after its September 2nd earnings report. The enterprise computing infrastructure provider posted revenue growth of 16.2% and networking revenue growth of 75%, while non-GAAP gross margin expanded to 16.2% from 8.5%. The company also raised its fiscal year 2026 revenue growth guidance to a range of 34% to 37% and reported $2.4 billion of AI orders in Q3, up from 1.8 billion in Q2. Despite the top-line strength, profitability remains a concern, as the Networking operating profit margin for the nine months ending came in at 22.4%, down from 25.1% in the prior period, and management noted that orders grew 3x to 5x times faster than revenue, which could delay recognition. Hedge fund interest rose as well, with 85 funds holding a stake in Q2 versus 58 in Q1, including a new $120 million position from Point72 Asset Management.

Inspur Information, a leading domestic server maker, announced on the evening of September 11 that it plans to issue no more than 96 million shares to specific investors, raising total proceeds of up to 9 billion yuan, mainly for AI infrastructure, liquid-cooled computing power, integrated storage and computing research and development, high-density computing equipment upgrades, and replenishing working capital. After deducting issuance expenses, the proceeds will be used for five major projects: the next-generation AI infrastructure R&D and industrialization project with a total investment of 3.458 billion yuan, of which 2.6 billion yuan will come from the raised funds; the liquid-cooling-native computing infrastructure R&D and industrialization project with a total investment of 1.811 billion yuan, of which 1.4 billion yuan will come from the raised funds; the key technology R&D project for multi-agent collaborative storage-computing integrated computing infrastructure with a total investment of 2.059 billion yuan, of which 1.4 billion yuan will come from the raised funds; the high-density computing equipment intelligent manufacturing and delivery capability upgrade project with a total investment of 1.005 billion yuan, of which 900 million yuan will come from the raised funds; and another 2.7 billion yuan from the raised funds to replenish working capital. The company said that if the actual net proceeds are less than the total planned investment, the board of directors will adjust the investment order according to project priority and cover any shortfall through self-raised funds. Inspur Information stated that this fundraising and investment aims to seize market opportunities in intelligent agents and liquid cooling. According to IDC data, the number of active agents worldwide was 28.6 million in 2025 and is expected to reach 2.216 billion by 2030; according to a CCID Consulting report, China's liquid-cooled data center market reached 15.98 billion yuan in 2025, up 45.2 percent year on year, and is expected to reach 47.04 billion yuan by 2028.

The compute landlord thesis went global this week as Google, NVIDIA and SpaceX each moved to lock down power, distribution and capacity. Google committed €13B to Finland, securing a 22-year power purchase agreement with the Fortum Loviisa nuclear plant. NVIDIA reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9B, taking control of the main conduit for open-weight models such as Qwen and DeepSeek, which account for 61% of tokens consumed on OpenRouter. At SpaceX, an undisclosed tenant signed a $13.3B annual commitment, lifting total ARR for the hosting unit to roughly $41B across four pillars — Anthropic, Google, Reflection AI and the mystery customer — with 90-day termination clauses starting in 2027. In China, prices for Huawei and Cambricon AI chips are surging 20% to 50% as export controls push manufacturers into grey-market high-bandwidth memory; the Huawei Ascend 950DT now carries an indicated price above 250,000 yuan, roughly $37,000 per accelerator, while Cambricon's forthcoming 690 chip has been repriced 20% to 30% higher than quotes from two months earlier. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash cuts inference costs by 80% through its Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, compressing cache-hit costs to $0.003 per token, and Positron AI raised an $875M Series C at a $5B valuation for its Asimov chip, which swaps scarce high-bandwidth memory for commodity LPDDR5X and claims 90% bandwidth utilization against NVIDIA's typical 30%.

Super Micro Computer has announced a new partnership with Cisco to supply high-density liquid and air-cooled compute systems for AI infrastructure, integrating its systems into Cisco's Secure AI Factory architecture, which utilizes NVIDIA technologies for enterprise, neocloud, and sovereign cloud customers. This collaboration broadens Super Micro's access to rack-scale and dense GPU systems validated for Cisco's AI offerings, positioning the company within the hardware layer of AI infrastructure. The deal supports Super Micro's narrative of winning recurring, high-value rack-scale orders as AI infrastructure is deployed globally, while also raising concerns about hardware commoditization and price wars, as Cisco will influence system design and pricing. Analysts have flagged margin stability as a concern, questioning whether Super Micro's modular, liquid-cooled offerings can maintain differentiation within Cisco's portfolio.