There is a reason the largest AI builders in the world do not run all-flash storage. It is

For most of the AI infrastructure buildout, storage was optimized for one thing: feeding training runs. The playbook

HDDs Aren’t Dying. They’re Disappearing Off Shelves.  The most resilient storage architectures in AI infrastructure have one thing in common:

Some storage architectures silently consume 5 GB of DRAM and up to 4 CPU cores per GPU node. At 500 nodes, that’s 2.5 TB of DRAM and 2,000 cores lost to storage overhead — a hidden tax you can no longer afford.

NAND prices surged up to 60% in one quarter. Storage now consumes up to 30% of the infrastructure budget. The operators who planned for this are fine. The rest are doing the math.