Getting a large dataset into Pinecone has always been the first step before anything useful can happen — search, evaluation, production traffic. Bulk import is the fastest path to that point, and the cost to do it just dropped significantly. Starting June 1, bulk import is free up to 1 TB. Standard and Enterprise plans get a $250 credit applied automatically. After 1 TB, import runs at $0.25/GB – down 75% from $1/GB.How bulk import worksBulk import is already the fastest way to get a large dataset into Pinecone because it skips the standard write path entirely. Upsert acknowledges every request, sequences it, holds it in the memtable, and flushes before the index builder picks it up -- guarantees that matter for continuous writes, but overhead for a large one-time load. Bulk import reads directly from object storage into the index builder. The result is the same populated index through a more efficient path.Semantic search over 200 bird species in a few linesA terabyte of bulk import covers roughly 130 million records at 1024 dimensions with typical metadata. That's enough to load a substantial evaluation corpus, stand up a semantic search prototype against real data instead of a toy slice, or seed a production index before incremental writes take over.The workflow has three steps regardless of scale: turn raw data into embeddings, write those embeddings as Parquet files in object storage, then call . The example below uses the bird search corpus -- ~200 North American bird Wikipedia articles -- because it runs end-to-end in a few minutes. The same code handles a 1 TB load with a larger input dataset.Index configuration for this example The bird search index uses dedicated read nodes (t1, 1 shard). See Create a dedicated read nodes index for the full setup.Generate the embeddings(Note: If you already have Parquet files with vectors you can skip this step.)Bulk import expects vectors, not raw text, so the first step is converting each bird article into a 1024-dimensional embedding. The loop below batches articles into groups of 96 and sends each batch to Pinecone's hosted inference API using the model. tells the model these are documents being indexed (as opposed to queries), and handles articles that exceed the model's context window.EMBED_MODEL = "multilingual-e5-large"