Alex Bouzari isn’t one for the tech-founder uniform of khakis and a hoodie. Instead, he largely designs his own clothes. Think Willy Wonka on a bender: Regency-inspired suits, huge popped collars and crocodile-skin shoes. The interior of his Paris pied-à-terre, a grand 19th-century apartment on a leafy avenue radiating off the Arc de Triomphe, is just as maximalist. Everything from the marbled carpets to the lime-green sofas and even the chinaware is the product of the 65-year-old French-Iranian émigré’s imagination. “I just love to design,” says Bouzari, the cofounder and CEO of data storage company DDN. “Over the years, I’ve developed this network of people who can translate my scribbles into things that can be made.” ‎ Bouzari’s colleagues wince at his sartorial choices. “Very unusual. . . . I asked him to tone it down years and years ago,” says Bouzari’s cofounder, Paul Bloch, 65, who himself favors “conservative” attire for meetings. “Inappropriate” was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s blunt take, in Bouzari’s telling. Even random Parisians mock him: “They stop the car in the street to say: ‘Didn’t we kill all of you in the French Revolution?’ ” says Bouzari, who splits his time between Paris and Las Vegas, where he has decked out his home with Art Deco touches. While tastes may vary, DDN is undeniably Bouzari’s finest work. Since 1998, his Chatsworth, California–based company has managed data storage for the world’s fastest supercomputers. These machines can crunch numbers at blinding speeds—more than a quintillion (that’s a one followed by 18 zeroes) operations a second—assuming they can be fed data fast enough. At the time, the hard drives that held the data were often the chokepoint. Bouzari not only sells super-fast hard drives but also uses software to break up enormous files and spread them simultaneously across thousands of drives. “We enable [data] highways to be filled with cars, without congestion, where every lane is full all the time,” he says. Over the years, Bouzari and Bloch built the largely bootstrapped DDN into an approximately $300 million–a-year operation. But it was always going to be a niche business. There were only a few hundred labs in the world running these sorts of supercomputers. Growth slowed. Then came Nvidia. The chip giant started linking its GPUs together in 2016 to make its own supercomputer perfect for running billions of parallel computations for artificial intelligence. But Nvidia’s team started to encounter the same problems as the physicists and researchers using more traditional supercomputers built by IBM or Cray: The chips were lightning-fast, but getting them the right data at the right time was a headache. Huang might not care for Bouzari’s fashion sense, but he definitely liked DDN. “The day we turned on the supercomputer the storage failed. It just could not handle the load,” says Nvidia VP Marc Hamilton, who worked on the project. “We brought in DDN and it just worked, and they have been a partner since then.” But even with Nvidia onboard, it is only in the last few years—as the AI revolution has kicked into higher and higher gear—that DDN’s business really started to boom. In 2024, revenue was around $400 million. It hit $500 million a year later. In 2026, it’s on track to double to $1 billion, thanks to contracts with companies including Elon Musk’s xAI and national governments that are building their own AI supercomputers. It’s not just DDN. Demand for other data center gear has surged so much that stoage memory card maker SanDisk’s stock is up 3,100% over the last 12 months, giving it a $210 billion market cap. Micron, which makes an even more valuable type of memory chip, has seen its revenue quadruple year over year to $41.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Its shares also rose more than 615% over the last 12 months. Bouzari’s pitch that his software can help such expensive AI hardware run more efficiently has been an easy sell to executives digesting sticker shock from a new Nvidia server costing around $500,000—before the outrageous electric bills. DDN claims such servers often sit idle around two-thirds of the time. Software that allows more data to flow faster to and from the GPUs means that these chips can now run with virtually no downtime. “We are a data engine that makes GPUs profitable and productive,” Bouzari says. In January 2025, Blackstone bought a $300 million stake in the business, valuing it at $5 billion. It was a windfall for Bouzari and Bloch, who have equal stakes of around 40% that are now worth $2 billion. But perhaps even more valuable than the financing is access to Blackstone’s clients, and the Wall Street giant’s $325 billion data center portfolio. With a prize this big, it’s natural that there’s competition. A handful of public companies such as Dell, Everpure and NetApp sell storage but have been slow off the mark on AI. Smaller startups like Weka and Hammerspace are also winning deals, but DDN’s biggest challenger is New York–based Vast Data. The firm, valued at an eye-popping $30 billion after a $1 billion fundraise in April, sells data storage software to public AI data center giant CoreWeave (market cap: $38 billion) and other AI outfits like Nebius and Mistral. Turning a 28-year-old company into an agile startup involved some growing pains. Part of the problem was that for too long the firm stuck with a package deal, selling its software along with its hard drives. It started selling standalone software only in 2023, after many potential customers switched to buying their own drives. It still sells hard drive racks, but its software sales are vastly more profitable, with gross margins of over 90% (compared to 60% for hardware). “It’s a business that’s gone through puberty in its late 20s,” says John Watson, a senior managing director at Blackstone. “[Bouzari and Bloch] aren’t like two 25-year-old kids; they are established and extremely successful entrepreneurs but still so hungry to win.”Bouzari stumbled into the storage business as a young Caltech graduate after attending a government trade show and seeing an early removable hard drive designed to back up home computers. The market for PCs and Macs was already covered, but he realized that governments would also want them to keep sensitive data under lock and key. Born in Paris to Iranian parents, Bouzari teamed up with his Caltech college friend Bloch, one of the few other French students who had also studied engineering on the Pasadena campus in 1984. Together they built Mega Drive Systems into an approximately $30 million–a-year business by 1998, but it was difficult for a small operation to go head-to-head against blue-chip names like IBM and EMC. Bouzari already had a foot in the door with some of the world’s leading labs, where researchers would gripe to him that they would lose valuable data from experiments because the hard drives could not keep pace with their supercomputers. “We didn’t know any better and tried to solve it because no one else wanted to,” Bouzari says. He and Bloch were able to build a fix and quickly began landing deals. In 2001, they raised nearly $10 million in venture funding. That was a disaster, Bouzari says: His new investors pushed DDN to chase corporate deals just as the economy lurched from bad to worse after 9/11. Their cash pile was dwindling, and the VCs began to push for a fire sale. Instead, DDN’s founders dug in. They cut headcount and talked the remaining staff into skipping a few paychecks. “One week became six weeks of runway, and by then we were back to being profitable,” says Bouzari, who bought out the investors in 2002. For many years, few outside the world of supercomputers and high-end tailors (Bouzari used to share a shirtmaker with Karl Lagerfeld) would have had reason to hear of DDN. But by 2008, it had grown to $100 million in revenue. Sales doubled to $220 million by 2018, all without a dime of outside capital. That made DDN into the type of profitable business that enabled Bouzari to shop not just for yachts but for a Norwegian shipyard specializing in “explorer class” vessels (that foray didn’t ultimately work out). “We tried to do that. It’s complicated. I mean, shipbuilding is very complex,” says Bouzari with a sigh. Now he’s designing an even grander project. Since March, he has been working on a new data center in Wheeler, Texas, that could scale up to 1.3 gigawatts. That’s the size of some of Meta’s new data centers and would consume as much power as 1 million homes. Bouzari is still lining up financing, as costs could run to over $60 billion. But unlike his home design projects, this one is all about running fast, cheap and efficient, at a billion-dollar scale.French Connections