NetApp, Inc Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. It was a super strong start to the year. Pretty much every product line, every district, every industry, every country was well ahead of plan. We had record revenue, earnings per share. Billings was in record territory. All Flash Array revenue was a record up 47% year-on-year. Cloud continues to grow in the high teens, adjusted for the extra week, and so we feel really, really positive about the momentum in the business.

What we are seeing is the broad-based pattern of demand that we're seeing, which gave us confidence to raise the full year, and the outlook provides real confidence in the durability, is this idea that to use AI models effectively, you need robust data infrastructure because the output that these models and agents generate are only as valuable as well-curated, high-quality data. We saw wins in our AI-specific configurations that were up materially year-on-year, but we also saw a broad-based upgrade of databases and lakehouses and streaming engines and all of the other associated applications that go alongside AI. Broad-based demand from a customer standpoint, and this is driven by the fact that as we have seen customers deploy these AI use cases, they need better and better storage and data infrastructure.

Yeah. AI models are essentially probabilistic engines, and to get accurate results from those models, you need to apply them and use your enterprise data against those models. That enterprise data is typically smeared across cloud, across a variety of applications, and across a variety of different storage environments and customers. Our view has always been that it's important to unify all of these landscapes so that you can bring different data types, different data applications under one common rubric so that the model gets the best output. Our long-term thesis that hybrid multi-cloud needs to be unified across type, media, and applications is coming through.

I think first of all, the size of the AI deals, which are really specifically tied to unique AI configurations that we can track, the number of deals has grown materially, as you noted, year-on-year, and the size of those deals has also grown. We have seen customers who deployed proof of concepts with us a year ago or six months ago come back and say, "Yep, the proof of concept worked. I want to expand the footprint." That being said, the impact of AI in our business is much broader. I think people are upgrading a lot of other storage and applications to work alongside the AI-specific configurations. So we see the demand picture being really strong across a broad book of business. I think with regard to the margin profile, there's no material difference between our broad-based enterprise business and the AI-specific environments.

Yeah, I think we introduced the AFX platform for customers who want the flexibility to gang up different sizes of compute instances with storage in really, really flexible ways. Those are typically large enterprises and some of the NeoClouds. We have seen good uptake. They go through a certification process, but we've disclosed on the calls momentum and progress with the AFX platform, which is good. We are going to be announcing even more advancements for the really high end of the NeoCloud for training and this frontier models use cases coming up at Insight. Super excited about that announcement.

Yeah, I think two or three things. I think one is, we have proven to have been able to deploy hyperscale level data management, data infrastructure, because we are embedded in all of the big hyperscale providers. We know how the technology from a scalability, from a provisioning, ease of provisioning, from a cloud-native operating paradigm is super proven. We also have go-to-market models that allows the NeoClouds and our sales teams to work together on opportunities where we are more partner than vendor. Then, of course, as the NeoClouds have gone or want to move from just training or what you call stateless, meaning workloads that are very temporal to more enduring workloads, data management, security, sovereignty, all of the controls we provide, as well as hybrid use cases become more important.

Our opportunity there is growing, and we see broader engagements from all of them.