Object Storage Dominates 91% of Private AI Deployments in Production — Scality

Event summary

91% of enterprises running private AI in production use object storage, per Freeform Dynamics research.
81% of enterprises consider private AI infrastructure critical for sovereignty, compliance, and data proximity.
57% of enterprises prioritize storage performance to avoid AI bottlenecks, outpacing compute and network concerns.
40% of enterprises cite metadata handling at scale as a bottleneck risk in AI deployments.
Research based on a survey of 504 senior IT and data professionals at medium to large enterprises.

The big picture

As AI adoption matures, enterprises are increasingly deploying private AI to maintain control over their data and infrastructure. The research highlights that storage infrastructure, particularly object storage, is emerging as a critical constraint in production AI environments. This shift underscores the importance of scalable, sovereign data solutions in the AI era, as organizations seek to optimize performance, compliance, and cost management.

What we're watching

Infrastructure Priorities: How enterprises will balance storage performance with compute and network investments as AI deployments scale.
Data Governance: Whether the emphasis on private AI infrastructure will drive further regulatory compliance and data sovereignty requirements.
Storage Evolution: The pace at which object storage solutions will adapt to support both high-throughput training and low-latency inference workloads.