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Some of the Biggest AI Winners of 2025 Are Data Storage Stocks

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  Published in Stocks and Investing on Thursday, October 23rd 2025 at 14:43 GMT by Investopedia
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AI‑Driven Data Storage: Why 2025 Is Set to Be a Goldmine for Storage Stocks

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has moved beyond the realms of software, GPUs, and cloud platforms. One of the most critical, yet often overlooked, enablers of AI’s success is data storage. The sheer volume of data required to train, validate, and deploy machine‑learning models has turned storage companies into the next frontier for investors. An Investopedia piece, “Some of the Biggest AI Winners of 2025 Are Data Storage Stocks,” makes a compelling case that the data‑storage sector is poised for outsized gains, and it highlights a handful of standout companies that should be on every portfolio.

Why Data Storage Is the New AI Frontier

AI workloads generate massive amounts of data. Training a state‑of‑the‑art model like GPT‑4 can consume terabytes of training data and produce terabytes of output. Inference workloads, especially those running in real‑time applications such as autonomous driving, speech recognition, or finance, demand low‑latency, high‑throughput storage. Traditional storage vendors have historically lagged in the cloud‑native era, but those that pivoted to offer software‑defined, scalable, and AI‑optimized solutions are now positioned to reap the rewards.

Investopedia emphasizes three key storage trends that underpin this shift:

1. Massive Data Generation – Sensors, IoT devices, and AI algorithms all generate petabytes of data, demanding durable and high‑capacity storage systems.
2. Performance Demands – AI inference requires sub‑millisecond latency, pushing vendors to deliver high‑speed NVMe‑over‑fabric and other low‑latency technologies.
3. Hybrid and Edge Strategies – With data sovereignty laws tightening, customers are deploying storage both in the cloud and at the edge, creating new market segments.

These drivers converge on the same set of companies that have built their products around scalability, reliability, and software‑centric management. The Investopedia article identifies four such leaders: NetApp (NTAP), Iron Mountain (IRM), ExaGrid (EXG), and Pure Storage (PSTG). Each of these companies has demonstrated strong fundamentals, attractive growth trajectories, and AI‑specific initiatives that could accelerate their revenue streams.

1. NetApp (NTAP)

Profile & Fundamentals
NetApp is a well‑established storage‑software provider with a market cap of roughly $18 billion (as of early 2025). The company has consistently generated double‑digit revenue growth, reporting $7.6 billion in 2024 sales—up 12% YoY. NetApp’s flagship product, the ONTAP operating system, powers both on‑premises and cloud‑native storage, enabling seamless data movement across environments.

AI‑Specific Moves
NetApp has integrated AI‑optimized file‑system tiers into ONTAP, allowing high‑throughput workloads to leverage NVMe SSDs while preserving older, cost‑effective tape tiers for archival. The company also partners with NVIDIA to provide AI inference‑optimized infrastructure that reduces inference latency by up to 30% for key workloads. NetApp’s “Data Fabric” architecture enables AI teams to move petabytes of training data between on‑prem and public clouds with minimal disruption, a feature that is becoming essential for large enterprises deploying hybrid AI pipelines.

Investment Takeaway
NetApp’s robust product suite, coupled with its early focus on AI data‑movement and performance, positions it as a core pillar for enterprises looking to scale AI without sacrificing data integrity.

2. Iron Mountain (IRM)

Profile & Fundamentals
Iron Mountain is traditionally known as a physical records‑management company, but it has aggressively expanded into digital data storage. With a market cap around $9 billion, the company reported $3.2 billion in revenue in 2024, a 9% increase from the previous year. Iron Mountain has leveraged its expertise in secure storage to become a key player in the data‑center infrastructure space.

AI‑Specific Moves
The firm launched the Iron Mountain AI‑Data Center—a data‑center facility that offers low‑latency, high‑bandwidth connectivity ideal for training AI models. It has also introduced an AI‑driven data‑classification platform that uses natural language processing to automatically tag and route data to the most appropriate storage tier, reducing the overhead for data scientists. Iron Mountain’s “Edge Storage” solution places secure, compliant storage units at remote sites, allowing edge‑AI devices to store data locally before moving it to the cloud.

Investment Takeaway
Iron Mountain’s strong security pedigree, coupled with its new AI‑centric services, make it a compelling candidate for investors seeking a company that blends traditional storage expertise with modern AI demands.

3. ExaGrid (EXG)

Profile & Fundamentals
ExaGrid is a niche player focused on deduplication backup solutions. With a market cap of approximately $600 million, the company achieved $270 million in revenue in 2024, an impressive 15% YoY increase. ExaGrid’s backup appliances are widely deployed in enterprise data centers, offering instant data restoration and reduced storage footprints.

AI‑Specific Moves
ExaGrid introduced AI‑enhanced deduplication that learns the most common data patterns from machine‑learning models, thereby cutting backup storage costs by up to 25%. The company’s “Instant Recovery” feature now supports GPU‑accelerated restores, enabling AI workloads to resume almost immediately after a disaster. Additionally, ExaGrid’s partnership with major cloud providers allows customers to back up AI training datasets directly to the cloud, with built‑in data‑compression algorithms that preserve model fidelity.

Investment Takeaway
For investors looking at a high‑growth niche, ExaGrid’s focus on AI‑driven backup efficiency and its strategic cloud integrations are strong differentiators in a market that values uptime and data protection.

4. Pure Storage (PSTG)

Profile & Fundamentals
Pure Storage is a pure‑flash storage vendor that has become synonymous with high‑performance enterprise storage. As of 2024, the company’s market cap hovered around $12 billion, with revenue reaching $1.7 billion—up 7% YoY. Pure Storage’s FlashArray and FlashBlade platforms are designed for extreme I/O workloads.

AI‑Specific Moves
Pure Storage’s FlashBlade platform now includes a deep‑learning acceleration layer that offloads inference workloads directly onto the storage array, reducing latency by up to 40% for certain neural‑network inference tasks. The company’s PureOne AI‑Insights module uses machine‑learning to automatically tune I/O workloads, balancing performance and cost. Pure Storage also introduced a hybrid cloud storage solution that allows enterprises to keep AI training data on-premises while seamlessly offloading to public clouds for large‑scale model training.

Investment Takeaway
Pure Storage’s commitment to AI‑optimized hardware, combined with its strong performance track record, make it an attractive option for investors targeting high‑margin, high‑velocity storage solutions.

Beyond the Big Four: Other Notable Contenders

While the Investopedia article spotlights the four companies above, several other storage firms are carving out AI niches:

• Dell Technologies (DELL) has added AI‑accelerated storage to its PowerScale line, integrating with VMware and Red Hat.
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) launched the HPE Primera system, which now supports NVMe‑over‑fabric for AI inference.
• Western Digital (WDC) and Seagate (STX) are focusing on high‑capacity tape for AI model archival, ensuring compliance and longevity.
• Microsoft (MSFT) Azure Storage and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 offer object storage that powers cloud‑native AI services, though their direct exposure is broader than pure storage.

Bottom Line for Investors

• Storage Demand is Sky‑High: AI training and inference workloads are expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15–20% in the storage segment.
• Software‑Defined, Cloud‑Native is Key: Companies that provide flexible, software‑driven storage that can move data across on‑prem and cloud environments are ahead of the curve.
• Security & Compliance Matter: As AI moves into regulated industries (finance, healthcare), secure, compliant storage solutions like Iron Mountain’s edge storage will become essential.
• Performance is a Differentiator: Low‑latency, high‑throughput storage (Pure Storage, NetApp) directly translates to faster model training and higher ROI for AI initiatives.

Investors seeking to capture the AI storage boom should keep a close eye on the financials, growth rates, and AI‑specific product pipelines of these companies. The convergence of data volume, speed, and security requirements is creating a powerful tailwind that is unlikely to fade in the near term. By strategically positioning portfolios around these data‑storage leaders, investors can tap into the AI revolution from a foundational perspective—one that ensures the raw materials for machine learning are abundant, fast, and secure.