MinIO, the provider of the data foundation for enterprise AI, has launched two new subscription tiers for its AIStor platform: AIStor Free and AIStor Enterprise Lite. These additions complement the existing AIStor Enterprise offering, providing organizations with flexible options to adopt an object-based data foundation tailored for modern AI workloads—from initial experimentation to large-scale production environments. AIStor Free offers a no-cost entry point for developers, data scientists, and teams to build, test, and experiment using the same production-grade architecture used in enterprise deployments. This tier removes upfront infrastructure barriers, enabling rapid innovation during the early stages of AI adoption without requiring immediate investment in enterprise systems. AIStor Enterprise Lite is designed for smaller production environments and growing teams that need reliability, high availability, and self-sufficiency. It provides a cost-effective way to run AI and analytics workloads in production while managing operational complexity and budget constraints. AIStor Enterprise remains MinIO’s flagship offering for organizations that rely on AI as a core business function. It supports the most demanding workloads, delivering top-tier performance, security, availability, and access to direct-to-engineer support and comprehensive onboarding. All three tiers run on the same production-grade, object-native architecture and binary, ensuring consistency across development, testing, and production environments. This eliminates the need for platform changes, feature gaps, or complex migrations as workloads scale. As AI systems grow in complexity, traditional file and block storage are increasingly unable to keep up with the high concurrency, throughput, and low latency demands of modern AI and analytics. MinIO AIStor addresses these limitations with a data store built from the ground up for AI, enabling efficient, reliable, and scalable operations. “AI has made the data layer a critical bottleneck in infrastructure,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and co-CEO of MinIO. “Traditional storage solutions are no longer sufficient. AIStor was built for an era where the data foundation is central to AI success, and these new tiers make it easier than ever to adopt a purpose-built data platform for AI.” AIStor Free is now available for immediate download. AIStor Enterprise Lite is available through MinIO sales, with self-service web purchasing expected soon. AIStor Enterprise is generally available today, with free trials accessible via MinIO’s website. MinIO is a leading provider of the data foundation for enterprise AI, designed for exascale performance and unlimited scalability. It offers a secure, sovereign, and AI-ready data store that spans edge, core, and cloud environments. Used by many Fortune 100 and Global 2000 companies, MinIO is redefining data management in the age of AI. The company is backed by major investors including AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.