NetApp Reports Strong Q3 2026 Earnings with Record Revenue and AI Growth
Written by Emily J. Thompson, Senior Investment Analyst
Updated: Feb 27 2026
0mins
Source: seekingalpha
- Significant Revenue Growth: NetApp reported Q3 2026 revenue of $1.71 billion, a 4% year-over-year increase, with a 6% rise excluding the divested Spot business, highlighting the company's strong performance in cloud computing and AI.
- Surge in AI Customers: Approximately 300 customers have chosen NetApp as their AI data storage foundation, indicating the company's appeal in the AI market, particularly with the strong early momentum of its new AFX and AI Data Engine (AIDE).
- Record All-Flash Array Revenue: All-flash array revenue reached $1 billion, growing 11% year-over-year, while Keystone's storage-as-a-service revenue saw a remarkable 65% increase, further solidifying NetApp's leadership in the storage market.
- Optimistic Outlook: The CFO projected total revenue for fiscal year 2026 to be between $6.772 billion and $6.922 billion, reflecting an 8% year-over-year growth, showcasing the company's confidence in future growth, especially with ongoing investments in AI and cloud services.
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Analyst Views on NTAP
Wall Street analysts forecast NTAP stock price to fall
19 Analyst Rating
6 Buy
13 Hold
0 Sell
Moderate Buy
Current: 158.310
Low
110.00
Averages
124.21
High
137.00
Current: 158.310
Low
110.00
Averages
124.21
High
137.00
About NTAP
NetApp, Inc. is an intelligent data infrastructure company combining unified data storage, integrated data, operational and workload services. It creates silo-free infrastructure, harnessing observability and AI to enable data management. Its operational and workload services provide continuous optimization of performance and efficiency for infrastructure and workloads through observability and AI. Its Hybrid Cloud segment provides a unified data storage portfolio of storage management and infrastructure solutions that helps customers modernize their data centers. Hybrid Cloud includes software, hardware, and related support, along with professional and other services. Its Public Cloud segment offers a portfolio of products delivered primarily as-a-service, including related support. This portfolio includes cloud storage, data services and operational services. These solutions and services are available in the public clouds, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
About the author

Emily J. Thompson
Emily J. Thompson, a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) with 12 years in investment research, graduated with honors from the Wharton School. Specializing in industrial and technology stocks, she provides in-depth analysis for Intellectia’s earnings and market brief reports.
- Global Unified Namespace: StorageGRID 12.1 introduces a global federated namespace, allowing customers to manage distributed storage systems scaling up to 10 Exabytes without rearchitecting applications, significantly enhancing data management flexibility and scalability.
- Significant Performance Boost: The new version delivers up to 400% higher throughput, reaching 12 TB/s, which helps customers reduce compute costs and improve efficiency when handling massive data volumes in AI factories, thereby accelerating data-driven decision-making processes.
- Enhanced Security and Governance: StorageGRID 12.1 strengthens controls for regulated environments with multi-admin verification, ensuring that customers can accelerate innovation while safeguarding their data and meeting compliance requirements.
- Industry Leadership Confirmation: Forrester named NetApp a Leader in its Q2 2026 report on object storage solutions, highlighting its strong adaptability for hybrid cloud and sovereign use cases, further solidifying NetApp's market position in enterprise data infrastructure.
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- Partnership Expansion: CGI and NetApp announced an expansion of their global alliance, leveraging NetApp Keystone to enhance CGI's block storage solutions, aimed at modernizing clients' IT infrastructure and improving data management across hybrid cloud environments, thereby driving digital transformation for clients.
- Technological Innovation: By combining NetApp's intelligent data management platform with CGI's expertise in cloud and AI, clients can accelerate critical workload processing, enhance operational efficiency and cybersecurity, thus translating technology investments into business value.
- Flexible Services: NetApp Keystone, as a flexible subscription service, adapts to clients' changing business needs by providing high availability and real-time threat detection, ensuring data security across data centers and cloud environments, further enhancing clients' data management capabilities.
- Strategic Commitment: The collaboration between CGI and NetApp reflects a shared commitment to driving client success, as they provide enterprise-grade data and storage services that enable flexible, consumption-based solutions to meet the evolving digital needs of clients across industries.
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- Partnership Expansion: CGI and NetApp announced an expansion of their global alliance, leveraging NetApp Keystone to enhance CGI's block storage solutions, which is expected to improve client operational efficiency and data management capabilities significantly.
- Driving Technological Innovation: By combining NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure with CGI's deep expertise in digital transformation and cloud services, clients can accelerate critical workload processing, enhance security, and speed up innovation, thereby achieving better business outcomes from technology investments.
- Flexible Service Model: NetApp Keystone, as a flexible subscription service, adapts to changing business needs while providing high availability and real-time threat detection, which is anticipated to help clients achieve superior performance and intelligent data management across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
- Strategic Collaboration Outlook: The partnership between CGI and NetApp not only addresses evolving digital needs but also aims to deliver best-in-class solutions that empower clients to achieve better business outcomes in AI scalability, thereby enhancing both companies' competitiveness in the market.
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- Jobs Data Surprises: The May jobs report revealed an increase of 172,000 payrolls, significantly exceeding the expected 80,000, which heightened concerns about the Federal Reserve maintaining elevated interest rates, leading to a broad market decline, particularly among high-valuation hardware stocks.
- Market Overreaction: As rate hike expectations rise, hardware and infrastructure companies like Dell (DELL) fell 3.5%, NetApp (NTAP) dropped 4.3%, and Everpure (P) decreased by 3.8%, presenting potential buying opportunities for investors looking for quality stocks amidst the volatility.
- NetApp's Strong Earnings: NetApp reported a 12.5% year-over-year revenue growth to $1.95 billion in Q1, with adjusted earnings per share of $2.43 surpassing analyst expectations, and the company provided an optimistic revenue guidance for the next quarter, 8.5% above consensus estimates, indicating robust profitability.
- Impressive Stock Performance: NetApp has surged 59.6% year-to-date, trading near its 52-week high of $181.08, and investors who purchased $1,000 worth of shares five years ago would now see their investment valued at $2,096, highlighting its long-term investment appeal.
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- Earnings Beat: NetApp reported non-GAAP earnings of $2.43 per share for Q4 2026, exceeding the Zacks consensus estimate of $2.27, while revenues of $1.95 billion surpassed expectations of $1.86 billion, indicating strong market performance driven by cloud and AI demand.
- Surge in AI Demand: The company secured over 1,100 AI and data preparation wins in fiscal 2026, with 500 in Q4 alone, highlighting AI as a central growth driver, particularly in areas requiring high-performance storage and data mobility.
- Optimistic Outlook: Management forecasts fiscal 2027 revenues between $7.33 billion and $7.58 billion, with non-GAAP EPS of $8.70 to $9.00, reflecting 8% revenue growth and 9% earnings growth despite rising component costs.
- Cash Flow and Buybacks: NetApp generated $900 million in free cash flow in Q4 and returned $303 million to shareholders while increasing its share repurchase authorization by $1 billion, demonstrating a robust capital allocation strategy.
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- Significant Earnings Growth: NetApp's net income surged by 19% year-over-year to $404 million in Q4 FY2026, demonstrating strong performance amid rapid AI growth, which further solidifies its market position.
- Revenue Continues to Rise: The company reported a 12.47% increase in net revenues to $1.948 billion, reflecting its leadership in hybrid cloud and intelligent data infrastructure, driving customer AI transformations.
- Impressive Annual Performance: For FY2026, NetApp's net income grew by 8% to $1.276 billion, with annual revenues increasing by 5% to $6.925 billion, indicating record highs across financial metrics and boosting investor confidence.
- Clear Strategic Positioning: CEO George Kurian emphasized that NetApp's unified data platform and flexible offerings support enterprises' AI scaling ambitions, ensuring sustained growth potential for the company despite competition from other AI stocks.
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