NetApp Malaysia has unveiled a major boost to its enterprise data platform with a new AI-focused engine designed to tackle one of the biggest hurdles in AI adoption: wrangling and governing sprawling global data.

The highlight of the upgrade is the NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE), developed alongside NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.

AIDE promises to make life easier for enterprises by helping them discover, understand and govern unstructured data, ensuring that AI applications and agents work with the most accurate and up-to-date information.

“Despite massive investments and market pressures to leverage AI for improved productivity and enhanced business decision making, data challenges are bottlenecking projects before they even reach production,” said NetApp chief product officer Syam Nair.

He added that organisations need platforms built from the ground up to scale storage, services and control independently, without being locked in.

One of AIDE’s standout features is a constantly updated global metadata catalogue that goes beyond ordinary file system metadata, analysing file content and semantically enriching it on the spot. This reduces repeated data movement, cutting costs and security risks along the way.

The platform will initially roll out this month to lighthouse customers and partners, with wider availability expected in early summer.

NetApp said AIDE will also broaden integrations with cloud and on-premises AI platforms, including Microsoft Azure AI, Google Cloud Vertex AI and LangChain.

It will support NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 and 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, NetApp AFF A-Series, C-Series and FAS storage, and NVIDIA STX modular rack-scale storage, designed to link AI compute with unstructured data efficiently and securely.