NetApp on July 16, 2026 announced that it had acquired DataPelago, a Mountain View-based AI data infrastructure startup, in a deal aimed at squeezing data-processing bottlenecks out of enterprise AI stacks. The intelligent data infrastructure giant said DataPelago will fold in as a wholly owned subsidiary, giving it a GPU-accelerated data engine that runs directly at the storage layer. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Compute at the data, not above it
DataPelago's core technology, Nucleus, is billed as a universal data processing engine that spreads work across CPUs and heterogeneous accelerators without shuffling data to external clusters. NetApp claims that by handling analytics and AI workloads where the bytes already live, Nucleus cuts infrastructure costs by up to 80% and delivers up to 10x the performance of conventional pipelines — a pitch that lands with buyers still absorbing large NVIDIA GPU orders.
Zero-copy AI at the storage layer
"Enterprises need data infrastructure that is just as intelligent and powerful to harness the potential of their data," NetApp CEO George Kurian said in the announcement. NetApp Chief Product Officer Syam Nair called it "true zero-copy activation" — language it will pair with its ONTAP OS, disaggregated AFX storage and the NetApp AI Data Engine to make enterprise data AI-ready without lifting it out of primary systems.
Another consolidation move in AI plumbing
The deal deepens NetApp's ties across the AI infrastructure stack after recent partnerships with Cisco, Google Cloud, Red Hat and SK Telecom. It also lands the same week that Fireworks AI closed a $1.5B Series D and enterprise AI backers like Databricks lined up a strategic round at a $188B valuation, underscoring how quickly the plumbing beneath AI factories is consolidating around a handful of full-stack vendors. Rajan Goyal, DataPelago's founder and CEO, said joining NetApp lets his team pair its acceleration engine with the industry's most widely deployed enterprise data platform.
Reporting based on coverage from NetApp Newsroom, BusinessWire and Techzine.