EP 65: The AI Bottleneck Nobody's Watching | Troy Liljedahl, Backblaze

Storage is the least glamorous layer of the AI stack — and often the actual reason GenAI pipelines stall between pilot and production. Sam sits down with Troy, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Backblaze, to unpack what's really happening under the hood when AI infrastructure fails to scale.

Topics covered:

• What actually happens when a GPU sits idle — and the opportunity cost most teams don't account for
• Why storage bottlenecks are the hidden reason enterprise GenAI adoption stalls
• Backblaze's role as a capacity and data lake tier for companies building their own models
• Inside B2 Overdrive: dedicated bandwidth up to a terabit per second, predictable IOPS, and no egress charges
• Why hyperscalers prioritize large foundational model companies over startups and researchers when resources tighten
• The financial case for avoiding egress costs when training on tens to hundreds of petabytes of data
• Skills engineers need to survive and prosper in the current AI infrastructure landscape — including agent management
• Advice for new grads entering the storage and infrastructure industry
• Why Troy sees parallels between today's AI hype cycle and the dot-com bubble — and why the technology shift is still real
• Why human interaction and direct customer conversations remain irreplaceable, even as AI reshapes product development

Guest Bio:
Troy is Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Backblaze, where he leads the team helping AI customers integrate cloud storage and solve data infrastructure challenges. He has nearly a decade of experience in cloud storage and AI infrastructure at Backblaze.

Connect:
Find Troy on LinkedIn to learn more about Backblaze's AI storage solutions.