MinIO has introduced two new subscription tiers for MinIO AIStor, Free and Enterprise Lite, expanding its portfolio beyond the existing AIStor Enterprise offering. The goal is to give organizations more flexibility in how they stand up an object-based data foundation for AI, whether they are in early experimentation or operating mission-critical, large-scale AI in production.

With these new tiers, MinIO AIStor becomes more accessible across a wide range of AI and analytics use cases. Teams can start with low-friction, no-cost experimentation and progress to fully supported enterprise deployments without changing platforms or re-architecting their data layer. Across all tiers, AIStor maintains the same underlying performance profile, reliability model, and object-native architecture required by AI workloads as they move from proof of concept to production.

AIStor Free: No-Cost Entry for Experimentation

AIStor Free is designed for developers, data scientists, and small teams building and testing storage. It provides access to the same AI data store architecture that MinIO customers run in production, but without subscription cost. This tier is designed to eliminate friction in the earliest stages of AI adoption, enabling teams to prototype and validate data flows, model training pipelines, and inference workloads before committing to enterprise infrastructure.

Because AIStor Free uses the same binary and object-native design as the paid tiers, organizations can validate performance and behavior under realistic conditions. This reduces the gap between lab environments and production deployments and limits surprises during scaling.

AIStor Enterprise Lite: Smaller Production and Growing Teams

AIStor Enterprise Lite is designed for smaller production environments and organizations that are beginning to operationalize AI and analytics workloads. This tier focuses on reliability and high availability, enabling customers to run AI in production while maintaining tighter control over operational complexity and spend.

Enterprise Lite assumes a level of customer self-sufficiency and includes some self-support expectations. In exchange, it provides a way to standardize on AIStor for production use without immediately stepping into the complete operational assurance model and cost structure of Enterprise. For many teams, this is a practical bridge between pilot projects and fully scaled, business-critical AI platforms.

AIStor Enterprise: Flagship Tier for Mission-Critical AI

AIStor Enterprise remains MinIO’s flagship subscription for organizations that treat AI as a core business capability. It targets the most demanding environments, where performance, availability, security, and operational assurance are non-negotiable. This tier is backed by enterprise-grade onboarding and direct-to-engineer support, giving customers predictable performance and support paths for large, distributed deployments.

AIStor Enterprise maps cleanly to exascale or near-exascale environments, to shared AI infrastructure across multiple business units, and to regulated or highly sensitive workloads that require SLA-backed support and deep operational integration.

Consistent Architecture Across All Tiers

A key design decision across the AIStor lineup is architectural consistency. All AIStor subscriptions, from Free through Enterprise, run the same production-grade, object-native architecture and the same binary. MinIO explicitly avoids feature forks, downgraded community builds, or limited-function trial versions.

This consistency simplifies long-term planning. Teams can start with AIStor Free or Enterprise Lite, then scale to Enterprise without migration dead ends or a data platform redesign. From a sales and deployment perspective, this reduces friction in expansion deals and standardizes operational patterns across environments.

Object-Native Data Foundation for Modern AI

As AI moves deeper into production, traditional file and block storage are increasingly exposed as bottlenecks. These systems were designed for earlier workloads and often struggle to meet the concurrency, throughput, and latency demands of large-scale AI training and inference. The result is underutilized GPUs, stalled pipelines, and unpredictable job completion times.

MinIO AIStor is positioned as an object-native data store purpose-built for AI and analytics. It is designed to support highly parallel access, large object sizes, and high aggregate throughput, which are critical for efficiently feeding modern AI frameworks. By replacing legacy file and block backends with AIStor, organizations can better utilize their AI infrastructure and maintain more predictable performance as workloads scale.

Data Layer as a Critical Component of AI Infrastructure

AB Periasamy, co-founder and co-CEO of MinIO, emphasizes that AI has elevated the data layer from a supporting component to a central element of AI infrastructure. In his view, traditional storage systems typically cap the achievable performance of AI stacks once they transition into production, regardless of how much compute is deployed.

Periasamy highlights that MinIO built AIStor for an era in which data storage is directly tied to AI success. He frames the new subscription tiers as a way to reduce barriers to adopting a dedicated, AI-focused data foundation. By making AIStor available for free experimentation through fully supported enterprise deployments, MinIO aims to align storage strategy with the operational realities of modern AI.

Availability

AIStor Free is available for immediate download to teams looking to start experimenting at no upfront cost. AIStor Enterprise Lite is currently available through MinIO sales, with web-based self-service purchasing planned for a future update. Available today, MinIO offers free AIStor Enterprise trials to help organizations evaluate the platform.