Training a 70‑billion‑parameter model is hard; storing its artifacts is harder.
A single checkpoint can reach 782 GB. Multiply that across datasets, tuning runs, and evaluation artifacts, and AI teams are quickly managing tens of terabytes. On traditional, centralized storage, that scale brings mounting costs, vendor lock‑in, and single points of failure that put timelines and IP at risk.
That’s why Heurist, a decentralized AI compute platform, is working with Akave Cloud.
Heurist provides the AI compute. Akave Cloud delivers the storage layer, combining a dedicated Avalanche L1 for onchain access control with Filecoin archives for verifiable durability to create a secure, S3-compatible storage layer for production-ready workloads.
This joint effort is a direct response to the predictable failure modes of centralized storage when pushed to its limits by AI workloads.
The Main Problems with Centralized AI Cloud Storage
As AI models grow, the infrastructure supporting them fractures under the strain. Developers and AI leaders face a constant trade-off between innovation, speed and operational reality.
- Exponential Scale, Exponential Cost: The 782 GB checkpoint is just one artifact. Multiply that across numerous experiments, versions, and datasets, and storage costs on traditional cloud providers become a primary budget constraint, slowing down innovation.
- Vendor Lock-In: Once terabytes of proprietary AI data are stored with a single hyperscaler, the high egress fees and engineering complexity of migration create a powerful form of lock-in, limiting architectural freedom.
- Compliance & Data Sovereignty: Auditors and regulators increasingly expect provable provenance, access, and deletion for AI datasets. Hyperscaler features like CloudTrail, S3 Object Lock, or Azure/GCP immutability help with internal tamper-evidence, but they remain provider-controlled artifacts, not external, third-party-verifiable proofs. At the same time, frameworks like the EU AI Act and GDPR demand independently auditable logs and data residency guarantees, while new “sovereign cloud” boundaries from providers constrain where and how data can be stored.
Akave Cloud combines S3-compatible object storage with content-addressed integrity (hash-based, tamper-evident) and onchain access controls, so AI developers and platform operators keep end-to-end control of models, datasets, and checkpoints.
Why this matters?
Without independently verifiable proofs and sovereign control, enterprises face rising compliance risk, limited defensibility in audits, and reduced trust across multi-party AI supply chains.
How does Akave Cloud × Heurist Deliver AI-Ready Infra?
This integration creates a seamless workflow from model creation to global distribution, built on verifiable infrastructure and familiar tools.
- For the Developer: Minimal changes—update S3 endpoint and credentials. Akave Cloud’s S3-compatible API supports existing tools (e.g., multipart uploads via AWS CLI (aws s3) / boto3), so workflows continue unchanged, backed by verifiable storage.
- For AI platforms : Heurist uses Akave Cloud as a scalable storage backbone. Model creators store and distribute their models, weights and datasets, globally with content-addressed integrity and provenance, while cryptographic keys and onchain policies enforce secure access and collaboration.
Example: When you upload a model, Akave Cloud assigns a unique content identifier, maintains fast S3-compatible access, and creates archival copies for long-term durability.
Together, Akave Cloud and Heurist deliver five advantages:
- Integrity & Control: Content-addressed integrity with onchain audit trails; access enforced by cryptographic keys and policy-based controls.
- Global Accessibility: Distributed providers ensure resilient, worldwide access.
- Cost-Efficient at Scale: Market-based pricing across multiple providers can reduce large-volume storage costs (e.g., lower egress exposure, flexible replication, provider choice), depending on workload.
- Elastic, Horizontally Scalable Capacity: Designed for multi-TB artifacts, checkpoints, and datasets.
- Agent Economy Ready – Heurist’s ZK-native micropayments enable frictionless agent-to-agent transactions and revenue sharing.
Building for Resilience, Control and Compliance
By distributing models and datasets across a global set of storage nodes, the Akave Cloud × Heurist architecture is resilient by design. It removes the single points of failure common to centralized clouds, keeping data pipelines operational and assets protected from localized outages or policy disruptions.
This foundation is also fundamentally open. The S3-compatible interface preserves portability and reduces vendor lock-in without requiring tooling changes. Creators and organizations maintain complete control over their intellectual property through cryptographic keys and onchain access rules, ensuring that the work they build remains their own.
And because every action is recorded with content-addressed proofs, organizations can meet emerging compliance requirements, from GDPR deletion requests to the EU AI Act’s demands for verifiable logs, without depending on vendor-controlled attestations.
The shared objective is a decentralized infra experience so intuitive and reliable it becomes the default for teams building the future of AI.
Connect with Us
Akave Cloud is an enterprise-grade, distributed and scalable object storage designed for large-scale datasets in AI, analytics, and enterprise pipelines. It offers S3 object compatibility, cryptographic verifiability, immutable audit trails, and SDKs for agentic agents; all with zero egress fees and no vendor lock-in saving up to 80% on storage costs vs. hyperscalers.
Akave Cloud works with a wide ecosystem of partners operating hundreds of petabytes of capacity, enabling deployments across multiple countries and powering sovereign data infrastructure. The stack is also pre-qualified with key enterprise apps such as Snowflake and others.