NetApp has unveiled a file system it claims is the “fastest storage on the planet” in a bid to tackle AI factory bottlenecks.
Dubbed ‘NetApp Novus’, the new system is designed primarily for organizations running AI factories, such as Neoclouds and GPU as a service providers. According to the firm, the launch comes in direct response to long-standing storage-related constraints, sparked by rampant AI advances.
Speaking to assembled press at NetApp Insight, Kurian noted that traditional storage architectures were never designed to contend with the huge compute demands of AI factories.
“We see clients in the largest AI factories or the enterprise struggle with how to work with the modern data and compute infrastructures,” he said.
“Most GPUs are not fed data at the rates that they need to be fed. They have a high degree of parallelism and concurrency, which makes traditional storage architectures not capable of addressing those requirements.”
Put simply, traditional storage architectures can’t keep pace with the scale and performance requirements of AI factories.
Bottlenecks, increased infrastructure costs, and reduced GPU utilization are all a direct consequence, and that has a downstream impact on broader AI innovation.
Figures touted by the company at its annual Insight conference this year show that, under traditional architectures, GPU utilization can drop below 30% when AI factories can’t feed enough data to GPUs.
With Novus, NetApp is tackling this challenge head on. The system will support zettabyte scale and is built to exceed throughput of 100Tbps, allowing AI factories to continuously feed thousands of GPUs at any given time.
Kurian went to great lengths to emphasize the sheer scale and performance afforded by Novus during the opening keynote.
“Imagine if you could unify all of the world’s data center capacity that shipped last year - 2,000 exabytes of data into a single namespace, the first of its kind,” he said.
“The first zettabyte-scale file system on the planet. Let that sink in”
Capitalizing on AI factories
The move by NetApp comes as the scale of AI factories skyrockets. While previous clusters typically housed around 10,000 GPUs, new builds on the horizon are targeting 50,000 and upwards.
In October last year, for example, Nvidia and Samsung unveiled plans for a new AI factory with 50,000 Nvidia GPUs. NetApp's own figures noted that a cluster of this size would require 100Tbps of cumulative bandwidth.
With this in mind, NetApp appears confident that it’s capitalizing on a highly lucrative market.
Recent analysis from Deloitte projects adoption to accelerate across a range of industries. In the energy sector, for example, adoption rates are expected to reach 82% by 2028, marking a significant increase compared to 2025 levels.
Elsewhere, financial services is another key growth area with regard to AI factory adoption, surging from just 24% in 2025 to 63% by 2028.
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