Alex Bouzari isn’t one for the tech-founder uniform of khakis and a hoodie. Instead, he largely designs his own clothes. Think Willy Wonka on a bender: Regency-inspired suits, huge popped collars and crocodile-skin shoes.

The interior of his Paris pied-à-terre, a grand 19th-century apartment on a leafy avenue radiating off the Arc de Triomphe, is just as maximalist. Everything from the marbled carpets to the lime-green sofas and even the chinaware is the product of the 65-year-old French-Iranian émigré’s imagination. “I just love to design,” says Bouzari, the cofounder and CEO of data storage company DDN. “Over the years, I’ve developed this network of people who can translate my scribbles into things that can be made.”

Bouzari’s colleagues wince at his sartorial choices. “Very unusual. . . . I asked him to tone it down years and years ago,” says Bouzari’s cofounder, Paul Bloch, 65, who himself favors “conservative” attire for meetings. “Inappropriate” was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s blunt take, in Bouzari’s telling. Even random Parisians mock him: “They stop the car in the street to say: ‘Didn’t we kill all of you in the French Revolution?’ ” says Bouzari, who splits his time between Paris and Las Vegas, where he has decked out his home with Art Deco touches.

While tastes may vary, DDN is undeniably Bouzari’s finest work. Since 1998, his Chatsworth, California–based company has managed data storage for the world’s fastest supercomputers. These machines can crunch numbers at blinding speeds—more than a quintillion (that’s a one followed by 18 zeroes) operations a second—assuming they can be fed data fast enough. At the time, the hard drives that held the data were often the chokepoint. Bouzari not only sells super-fast hard drives but also uses software to break up enormous files and spread them simultaneously across thousands of drives. “We enable [data] highways to be filled with cars, without congestion, where every lane is full all the time,” he says.

Over the years, Bouzari and Bloch built the largely bootstrapped DDN into an approximately $300 million–a-year operation. But it was always going to be a niche business. There were only a few hundred labs in the world running these sorts of supercomputers. Growth slowed.

Then came Nvidia. The chip giant started linking its GPUs together in 2016 to make its own supercomputer perfect for running billions of parallel computations for artificial intelligence. But Nvidia’s team........

© Forbes