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WEKA Federal achieves awardable status in Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace. Oct 07, 2026, 06:30 ET U.S. Department of War acquisition teams can now rapidly procure and deploy WEKA NeuralMesh software and solutions to get more AI output per GPU and per watt. CAMPBELL, Calif., Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - WEKA, the AI data and memory infrastructure company, today announced that WEKA Federal, its wholly-owned subsidiary, has been named an "Awardable" vendor in the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, recognized among a competitive field of applicants whose solutions demonstrated innovation, scalability, and potential impact on Department of War (DoW) missions. With this designation, WEKA(R) NeuralMesh(TM) software and solutions are now available for rapid procurement and deployment by DoW mission owners who need to accelerate artificial intelligence deployments in production without expanding their data center footprint or energy envelope. The Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace is a digital repository of post-competition, readily awardable pitch videos that address the DoW's most significant challenges in AI/ML, data, and analytics. This enables DoW program offices to avoid repeat technical evaluations and shortens the path from validated requirement to fielded capability. Tradewinds is housed in the DoW's Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO). "Every AI system the DoW fields is competing for the same megawatts, the same rack space, and the same accelerators. WEKA NeuralMesh makes each of those go further by turning data from a bottleneck into a force multiplier," said Brian Froeling, board member of WEKA Federal and chief revenue officer of WEKA. "The CDAO's Awardable designation means there's no procurement marathon ahead for DoW mission owners. Now they can award NeuralMesh directly and put it to work, fast." One Data Layer, Wherever the Mission Runs NeuralMesh was architected for the AI era, not retrofitted for it. Backed by more than 170 patents, it runs on standard hardware and in major public clouds, serving POSIX, S3, NFS, SMB, and GPUDirect Storage from a single namespace that scales to exabytes. With NeuralMesh, DoW program owners can: * Run a unified data layer that supports AI training, inference, and analytics across accredited data centers, cloud regions, and air-gapped environments. * Move applications between environments without requiring rewrites or separate infrastructure stacks. * Serve training data, checkpoints, and inference workloads through a native S3 object store that shares the same NVMe blocks and namespace as file data; no separate tier, no gateway, no duplicate copies to secure and manage. * Reduce infrastructure footprint by up to 8x and power draw by up to 6x versus scale-out NAS architectures at AI-factory scale, returning rack space, cooling headroom, and megawatts to the mission. * Reduce model training time by up to 20x, compressing the path from data to deployed capability. * Accelerate inference and agentic workloads with NeuralMesh and Augmented Memory GridTM, serving up to 10x more concurrent users per GPU while lowering cost per token. Established in 2020, WEKA Federal operates as an independent subsidiary supporting U.S. federal, defense, and public sector missions, delivering solutions across accredited data centers, cloud, tactical edge, and air-gapped environments. U.S. federal government agencies, national laboratories, research institutions, and contractors rely on NeuralMesh to run production AI, machine learning, and accelerated compute workloads. Watch the WEKA Federal Solution Video WEKA Federal's solution video, "The Data Path is the Mission," is available only to government customers on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace and demonstrates how WEKA Federal's awardable NeuralMesh software and hardware solutions deliver mission-speed data for training, inference, and the tactical edge. Visit www.tradewindai.com to get started. About the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace The Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace is a digital repository of post-competition, readily awardable pitch videos that address the Department of War's (DoW's) most significant challenges in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), data, and analytics space. All awardable solutions have been assessed through complex scoring rubrics and competitive procedures and are available to Government customers with a Marketplace account. Government customers can create an account at www.tradewindai.com. Tradewinds is housed in the DoW's Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office. About WEKA WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. The WEKA(R) NeuralMesh(TM) platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid(TM), NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served. Learn more at www.weka.io or connect with us on LinkedIn and X. WEKA and the WEKA logo are registered trademarks, and WEKA NeuralMesh and Augmented Memory Grid are trademarks of WekaIO, Inc. Other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. SOURCE WekaIO

Greater St. Louis, Inc., GeoSTL ink MOU to grow region's geospatial economy. Pictured Above: Ron Kitchens (left) and Mark Munsell Date posted: september 15, 2026. Posted in: regionalism. Greater St. Louis, Inc. and GeoSTL have formalized a partnership aimed at accelerating growth of the St. Louis region's geospatial technology sector, an ecosystem estimated at nearly $5 billion annually. The organizations have signed a memorandum of understanding that builds on their existing relationship and calls for closer collaboration on business attraction and expansion, public relations and public policy. The agreement comes as St. Louis works to capitalize on major investments in geospatial technology, including the $1.7 billion-plus National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency campus in North St. Louis and growing activity around geospatial artificial intelligence. GeoSTL was formed in January and formally launched in February as the regional "backbone" organization for the geospatial ecosystem, succeeding the GeoFutures initiative originally convened by Greater St. Louis, Inc. Its role is to connect industry, government, universities, entrepreneurs, investors and community organizations around a common strategy for growing companies, developing talent and attracting investment. "St. Louis has the assets, expertise, and momentum to lead the nation in geospatial technology," GeoSTL Executive Director Mark Munsell said in announcing the agreement. He said the partnership will strengthen efforts to connect talent, accelerate innovation and turn the region's geospatial assets into long-term economic growth. Greater St. Louis, Inc. Managing Partner Ron Kitchens said formalizing the organizations' relationship will help build on the region's emerging position as a national center for geospatial research and innovation. Working to Attract Geospatial Companies Under the agreement, the organizations will work jointly to attract geospatial companies while supporting companies already operating in the region. The partnership also extends into public policy. Among the initiatives cited by the organizations is support for the Missouri GIS Advisory Council Act, intended to create a formal structure for statewide geospatial strategy and coordination, as well as efforts to restore funding for the Missouri Technology Corporation. The agreement follows another major geospatial announcement in August. GeoSTL is spearheading development of the Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Center in partnership with technology companies including World Wide Technology, Google, Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, Overture Maps Foundation and WEKA. The initiative is intended to provide advanced computing infrastructure for AI and geospatial innovation. Broader Strategies of Careers, Entrepreneurship The broader regional strategy goes beyond technology development. GeoSTL's work includes expanding pathways into geospatial careers, supporting entrepreneurship and commercialization, attracting companies and investment, and measuring progress through job creation, investment and business growth. The organization is also placing particular emphasis on connecting growth in the geospatial sector with economic opportunity in North St. Louis, where the new NGA campus represents one of the largest federal investments in the city's history.

WEKA partnering Backblaze for its B2 cloud storage. Chris Mellor STORAGE EDITOR Blocks & Files editor Published thu 10 Sep 2026 // 14:03 UTC WEKA, which supplies high-speed unstructured data access for AI and accelerated computing, has a deal with Backblaze to store data needed for re-use in its B2 cloud storage. The two companies say GPUs need extremely fast access to data to stay fed, while the datasets, checkpoints and outputs surrounding those workloads are growing toward enormous scale and that data can need retaining. They are combining WEKA NeuralMesh for performance-sensitive AI and accelerated computing workloads with Backblaze B2 cloud object storage as the capacity layer for large datasets and retained AI assets. In effect, hot data in WEKA and cold data in B2's cloud. Data can be kept on the appropriate tier as it moves through ingestion, training, checkpointing, inference and downstream workflows. You can't keep once hot AI data on flash for ever. Gleb Budman, Backblaze's CEO, said: "AI teams need their GPUs fed and an infrastructure with the performance and capacity to support the full AI data workflow. WEKA has mastered the performance tier. Blocks & Files has spent nearly two decades doing the same for capacity storage. Together, AI teams get a qualified, complete solution to ensure fast and efficient production,. WEKA Chief Strategy Officer Nilesh Patel, neatly put forward WEKA's point of view: "AI workloads are stretching storage in two directions at once. GPUs need microsecond access to data to stay fed, while datasets and checkpoints are growing to exabyte scale. Our collaboration with Backblaze gives customers a validated path to both - without the cost of building and testing that integration themselves. Speed where it matters, scale wherever you need it." For example, raw training data (training sets, media libraries, source files) can reside in B2, move into NeuralMesh when needed for a performance-sensitive workload, and checkpoints and outputs can then return to B2 for retention and future reuse, or in situations where recovery to an earlier stage of testing is necessary. WEKA's Snap-to-Object capability has tested with Backblaze, enabling teams to recover checkpoints or saved inference data from the B2 capacity tier. Backblaze recently signed a $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave for that Neocloud to use B2 cloud storage for retained AI data. Coreweave is the fourth major AI cloud infrastructure company to contract with Backblaze in this way. Certification of B2 Cloud Storage for NeuralMesh is underway. Customers can contact Backblaze or WEKA to get started. Bootnote. Scality and WEKA set up a similar deal to the WEKA-Backblaze one, using WEKA's NeuralMesh high-performance storage with Scality RING's cost-efficient object tier, in February this year. Backblaze competitor Wasabi is also providing cloud storage for AI. It has formed a dedicated AI business, and appointed semiconductor and storage veteran Pinaki Mukherjee as SVP and GM to lead it. It says it stores hundreds of petabytes of AI data for frontier model labs, generative AI startups, and Neocloud compute providers worldwide. The new AI business will bring dedicated strategy, partnerships and go-to-market focus for this demand as AI infrastructure matures. Wasabi raised $70 million for AI cloud storage funding in January, and subsequently arranged a $250 million credit facility.