MinIO Introduces AIStor Free and Enterprise Lite Tiers

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REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 23, 2025--

MinIO, the data foundation for enterprise AI, today announced new subscription tiers for MinIO AIStor: AIStor Free and AIStor Enterprise Lite. These new tiers join the existing AIStor Enterprise subscription, and give organizations more flexible ways to adopt an object-based data foundation built for modern AI, from early experimentation to mission-critical exascale production environments.

With the new subscription tiers, MinIO AIStor is now more accessible across a wide range of AI and analytics use cases. Organizations can adopt AIStor in a way that fits their needs while preserving the performance, reliability, and architectural consistency required to run AI workloads with confidence as they move into production.

AIStor Subscription Tiers for Every Stage of AI Adoption

With the introduction of new subscription tiers, MinIO makes it easier to access this AI-ready data foundation in a way that matches their operational needs and stage of adoption:

• AIStor Free provides developers, data scientists, and teams with a no-cost way to build, test, and experiment using the same AI data store architecture used in production. It removes friction at the earliest stages of AI adoption, allowing teams to learn and innovate without committing to enterprise infrastructure upfront.
• AIStor Enterprise Lite is designed for smaller production environments and growing teams that require reliability and high availability, but can largely self-support. It offers a practical way to run AI and analytics workloads in production while maintaining control over operational complexity and costs.
• AIStor Enterprise is MinIO’s flagship subscription for organizations running AI as a core business capability. It supports the most demanding environments where performance, availability, security, and operational assurance are essential, backed by enterprise-grade onboarding and direct-to-engineer support.

Together, these subscription tiers provide organizations with a clear, consistent path to adopt AIStor without changing platforms or rethinking their data strategy as requirements evolve. All AIStor subscriptions run the same production-grade, object-native architecture and binary, ensuring architectural consistency across environments with no feature forks, degraded builds, or migration dead ends.

As AI moves into production, traditional file and block storage are increasingly becoming a bottleneck. Designed for earlier generations of applications, they struggle to meet the concurrency, throughput, and latency demands of modern AI and analytics workloads, directly limiting performance. Now more accessible than ever, MinIO AIStor replaces those constraints with an object-native data store built for AI, keeping systems running efficiently and enabling reliable AI operations in production.

“AI has made the data layer a gating factor for AI infrastructure,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and co-CEO of MinIO. “Traditional storage increasingly caps what AI systems can achieve in production. AIStor was built for an era where the data store is a critical part of AI success, and the new subscription tiers lower the barrier to adopting a data foundation designed specifically for AI.”

Availability

AIStor Free is available for immediate download. AIStor Enterprise Lite is available through MinIO sales, with web-based self-service purchasing coming soon. AIStor Enterprise is generally available today, with free trials offered through MinIO.

Resources

• Blog: Introducing New Subscription Tiers for MinIO AIStor
• Visit min.io/pricing to learn more about Enterprise Lite and Enterprise subscriptions, including subscription details.

About MinIO

MinIO is the data foundation for enterprise AI. Built for exascale performance and limitless scale, MinIO AIStor delivers a secure, sovereign, and AI-ready data store that spans from edge to core to cloud. With widespread adoption across the Fortune 100 and Global 2000, MinIO is redefining how organizations store, manage, and mobilize data in the AI era. MinIO is backed by AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and others.

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SOURCE: MinIO

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PUB: 12/23/2025 11:00 AM/DISC: 12/23/2025 11:00 AM

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