You can optimize GPUs all day and still lose control of your AI budget in one place: storage billing and data movement.
The centralized cloud model prices storage to look cheap, then taxes you to use your own data. Every retrieval, every training run, every cross-cloud analytics job feeds a meter you do not control.
Akave Cloud is now available. We have raised $6.65M to date, to build the compute-agnostic storage layer for sovereign AI.
Sovereign AI breaks on one question: who controls the data?
Most “AI infrastructure” discussions start with models and compute. In practice, the bottleneck is control.
Where does the data live? Who can access it? Who holds the keys? How is access audited? How do you move workloads across environments without triggering lock-in or compliance risk?
This becomes painfully practical when an auditor asks you to prove who accessed a dataset and when. It also shows up when a training run pulls data across environments and data movement becomes the bill driver.
If you cannot answer those questions with evidence, your AI strategy is built on trust and screenshots. That does not survive audits, multi-cloud reality, or the economics of scaling.
Akave Cloud is built for that moment.
Akave Cloud: a portable data lake without egress fees
Akave Cloud is S3-compatible object storage designed for AI and analytics workloads that need flat-rate economics and verifiable governance. It gives organizations a data lake they can move across AI and analytics platforms without egress fees.
Akave Cloud provides:
- Flat-rate pricing: $14.99/TB/month, with $0 egress fees (no S3 egress fees)
- On-chain verifiability: tamper-evident audit trails for storage actions
- Programmable access controls: blockchain-based policies that can be audited
- Compute-agnostic portability: architecture that reduces vendor lock-in
Kill the meter.
Akave Cloud includes a fully S3-compatible API, so it is a drop-in replacement for existing object storage workflows.
Why “compute-agnostic” matters in 2026?
AI infrastructure is fragmenting fast. Hyperscalers, specialized neoclouds, on-prem clusters, and sovereign regions all exist in the same deployment roadmap.
Storage is the anchor. If your storage provider taxes data movement, it effectively chooses where you can run compute. That is lock-in by invoice.
Akave Cloud decouples compute from storage so you can run workloads where it makes sense: for performance, for cost, for compliance, or for all three.
“We built Akave Cloud for full data ownership, auditability, and long-term flexibility”
“Distributed systems improve scale and resiliency by spreading workloads across multiple nodes, but decentralization reduces reliance on any single controlling party, a distinction critical for enterprises deploying AI,” said Stefaan Vervaet, founder and CEO of Akave. “The real challenge is maintaining control over where data lives, how it moves, and how it’s governed across environments. We built Akave Cloud to provide a portable, verifiable storage foundation that enables enterprises to run AI workloads with full data ownership, auditability, and long-term flexibility.”
Built on a dedicated L1 blockchain, designed for enterprise storage realities
Akave Cloud runs on its own dedicated Layer 1 blockchain so governance is not a “trust us” promise. It becomes something you can verify.
Akave Cloud provides on-chain verifiability for tamper-evident audit trails and programmable access controls that can be audited, creating evidence that is not dependent on vendor-controlled logs alone.
Customer momentum: AI and data-intensive teams are already live
Akave Cloud is already in production with organizations running data-intensive workloads:
- Intuizi processes large consumer intelligence datasets for martech and retail geospatial analytics.
- LaserSETI ingests and stores high-throughput astronomical observation data at scale with verifiable integrity for scientific research.
- 375ai collects data from edge camera devices and manages expansive AI training datasets, benefiting from flat-rate pricing and zero egress fees.
- Skymapper stores global telescope and all-sky camera observations on Akave Cloud to make each frame tamper-evident and provably authentic with cryptographic provenance.
Integrations that meet you where you already run analytics
Sovereign AI is not a rip-and-replace event. It is an architecture decision that has to work with existing pipelines.
Akave Cloud integrates with leading cloud applications and open-source communities including Snowflake and Apache Iceberg, so organizations can run analytics, SQL queries, and AI/ML workflows directly on decentralized storage without rearchitecting their pipelines.
Funding and investors
Akave was founded in 2024 by a team of data storage, data management, and web3 industry experts. We have raised $6.65M from investors including Protocol Labs, No Limit Holdings, Blockchange, Lightshift, Blockchain Builders Fund, Big Brain Holdings, Avalanche Foundation, and the Filecoin Foundation.
This funding accelerates three priorities:
- Enterprise-grade storage performance for AI and analytics workloads
- Governance and compliance controls that produce audit-ready evidence
- Compute-agnostic portability, so your data layer does not dictate your infrastructure choices
The storage layer for sovereign AI
Sovereignty is enforceable when it is implemented in mechanisms.
Customer-held keys. Access controls you can audit. Events you can verify. The option to move.
Start building
Akave Cloud is available today for enterprises and developers.
If you want to validate the economics and the control model in your environment, start with one bucket. Keep your S3 code. Bring your last cloud storage bill and we will walk through the data movement lines with you.
Read our full press release here.
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.