Executive Summary
AI Factories are the strategic infrastructure of the AI economy. They transform raw data into usable intelligence at industrial scale, accelerating innovation, improving model quality, and delivering outcomes faster.
Without the right AI Data Platform, these pipelines break down. GPU utilization drops, inference slows, and costs rise.
DDN is the certified storage and data intelligence layer of the world’s most powerful AI Factories. Our platform feeds GPUs at speed, integrates seamlessly with NVIDIA reference designs and accelerates every stage of the AI lifecycle from training to inference.
DDN ensures AI Factories deliver predictable performance, lower cost, and faster time to production. This paper explains how DDN transforms AI Factories from infrastructure into outcome engines.
What is an AI Factory?
AI Factories are specialized, industrial-scale AI workload processing platforms.
They are turnkey, repeatable systems designed to speed innovation, optimize AI workloads, and deliver outcomes at scale. AI Factories generate tokens efficiently, transform raw data into usable intelligence across the full AI lifecycle, provide predictable performance for specific workloads and SLAs, and accelerate innovation by enabling fine-tuned models, real-time decisions, and business insights to ensure competitive advantage.
Examples include:
- Sovereign AI initiatives securing data independence.
- Financial services leaders accelerating risk modeling and fraud detection.
- Life sciences innovators advancing drug discovery and precision medicine.
- Automotive and manufacturing leaders scaling autonomous vehicles and digital twins.
- NEO cloud providers delivering GPU-as-a-Service at scale with multi-tenancy.
AI Factories Can’t Succeed Without the Right Data Platform
AI Factories promise speed, scale, and innovation, but without a purpose-built data layer, they underdeliver. Pipelines stall. GPUs idle. Outcomes miss the mark.
Why?
Fragmented storage, poor data throughput, and siloed architectures starve the AI pipeline, from ingestion to inference. The result? Suboptimal GPU utilization (often 40% – 60%), delayed model deployment, and skyrocketing operational costs.
DDN Changes That
As the certified data intelligence platform inside the AI Factory, DDN eliminates storage bottlenecks and inefficiencies. We unify data across environments — core, cloud, and edge — with real-time throughput, intelligent metadata management, and policy-driven governance. Inference, analytics, and model prep all run at peak performance, ensuring your AI Factory delivers business results, not just prototypes.
With DDN, AI Factories sustain up to 95% GPU utilization, cut data infrastructure costs by 10x, and turn every rack into ROI.
The DDN Data Intelligence Platform Powers the Full AI Lifecycle
DDN unifies two production-proven engines into a single AI Data Platform. Each is optimized for distinct phases of the AI pipeline.
EXAScaler® is the most performant platform for AI training and high-throughput workloads. It delivers sustained data rates for model training, checkpointing, and large-scale simulations. EXAScaler® is deployed across exabyte-scale environments including NVIDIA’s Selene and EOS supercomputers. It is validated in DGX SuperPOD reference design and supports Blackwell and GB200 GPU systems.
Infinia is a software-defined data platform built for AI inference, Retrieval Augmented Generation, data preparation, and metadata-heavy workloads. It provides sub-millisecond latency and over one terabyte per second of throughput. Infinia integrates with KV Cache for inference acceleration, supports NeMo and NIM pipelines, and operates across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Together, EXAScaler® and Infinia form a single platform that eliminates AI pipeline fragmentation and ensures consistent performance from data ingest through inference.
Operational Outcomes at Scale
DDN systems deliver up to 99% GPU utilization compared to industry averages of 40% to 60%. Over a three-year period, customers operating AI Factories with 10,000 GPUs have realized a return on investment of 257 million dollars.
Infrastructure complexity is reduced by eliminating unnecessary nodes. Power and cooling requirements are lowered by 74%. Customers can scale from terabytes to exabytes without rewriting pipelines or introducing latency bottlenecks.
DDN powers NVIDIA internal production environments and national sovereign AI deployments globally. Customers include NVIDIA, xAI and CINECA. Our architectures are certified with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD and validated in AIDP design references, supporting Blackwell and GB200-based environments.
- Sustained GPU utilization up to 99%
- 257 million dollar ROI over three years for 10,000 GPUs
- 74% reduction in power and cooling cost
- Multiple TB per second throughput with sub-millisecond latency
- 600x faster object listing than competing platforms
- Certified with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD and AI Enterprise
QuoteWhen you absolutely need to meet performance goals and you want to make sure your solution is going to scale to any number of GPUs, DDN is really the undisputed leader in that space.
Marc HamiltonVP, Solutions Architecture & Engineering, NVIDIA
