Ananda Baruah's questions to NetApp (NTAP) leadership • Q1 2026
Question
Ananda Baruah of Loop Capital Markets LLC asked if recent wins in large-scale model training and AI-as-a-service represented a total addressable market (TAM) expansion. He also questioned if the emergence of reasoning agents was impacting the RAG pipeline.
Answer
CEO George Kurian confirmed that NetApp is leveraging its NVIDIA NCP certification to win deals with sovereign cloud providers for AI-as-a-service, viewing it as an opportunistic expansion beyond the core enterprise market. Regarding RAG, he explained that the primary customer challenge is data organization, where NetApp provides value. He also mentioned that NetApp is developing capabilities to make reasoning models more efficient, with more details to come at their user conference.