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NTAP & NVDA Power Agentic AI With Intelligent Data Infrastructure

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NetApp, Inc. (NTAP - Free Report) recently collaborated with NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) to advance the state of agentic AI. The initiative focuses on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, which enables businesses to harness their data more effectively for AI-driven reasoning and inference. By integrating NetApp ONTAP with NVIDIA’s AI computing and software ecosystem, enterprises can unlock the full value of their data and drive AI-powered decision-making with speed and efficiency.

As AI continues to evolve, enterprises must rethink their data strategies. The massive load of unstructured data in modern enterprises makes it difficult to extract insights efficiently. To address these challenges, the NTAP-NVDA partnership is introducing an Intelligent Data Infrastructure framework that aids businesses to break down data silos and integrate data from across hybrid multi-cloud environments, accelerate AI pipelines by ensuring seamless data availability for AI models and optimize storage and computing resources for high-performance AI workloads.

By integrating NetApp ONTAP with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, businesses can efficiently manage their data while harnessing NVIDIA’s AI computing, networking, and software ecosystem. The NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design allows enterprises to build distributed AI systems that transform raw data into actionable intelligence. 

NTAP customers can leverage the NVIDIA AI Data Platform to power AI reasoning workloads with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including AI-Q Blueprints and NIM microservices for Llama Nemotron Reason and other models. Blackwell GPUs, NVIDIA networking, and the Dynamo inference library enable near real-time insights.

Innovations Fueling NTAP’s Intelligent AI Data Pipeline

NetApp is enhancing its AI capabilities to support the NVIDIA AI Data Platform by introducing three critical advancements. With its Global Metadata Namespace, enterprises can discover, manage, and analyze data across distributed environments and also facilitate AI feature extraction and data classification. NetApp simplifies preparing unstructured data for AI applications with an Integrated AI Data Pipeline that tracks incremental data changes, uses NetApp SnapMirror for efficient data replication and classifies data and generates vector embeddings for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) inferencing.

In addition, NetApp’s Disaggregated Storage Architecture allows enterprises to optimize network and flash speeds, reduce infrastructure costs while maximizing compute performance and achieve high-speed data access with minimal power and space requirements.

NTAP shares a longstanding partnership with NVDA, including their joint efforts to develop enterprise-ready generative AI solutions. In September 2024, NTAP advanced its data management expertise with NVIDIA’s AI software and accelerated computing. The partnership was undertaken to boost RAG, which will unlock the power of next-generation agentic AI. Through the integration of NTAP’s ONTAP unified storage operating system with NVIDIA’s advanced AI software, the joined forces aim to empower enterprises to harness the full potential of their data for generative AI applications. 

The company is capitalizing on emerging opportunities in cloud/AI driven by strength in the flash business and Public Cloud segment. Its intelligent data infrastructure, bolstered by ONTAP and StorageGRID solutions, empowers its customers to efficiently scale workloads and harness AI while ensuring security and regulatory compliance. However, Spot divesture, forex woes and global Public sector weakness have affected its outlook for 2025. Management now expects full-year revenues in the range of $6.49-$6.64 billion, up 5% year over year at the mid-point. Earlier, it anticipated sales in the band of $6.54-$6.74 billion.

NTAP’s Zacks Rank & Stock Price Performance

Currently, NTAP carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Shares of the company have lost 11% in the past year compared with the sub-industry's decline of 36.3%.

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Stocks to Consider

Some better-ranked stocks from the broader technology space are InterDigital, Inc. (IDCC - Free Report) and Arista Networks, Inc. (ANET - Free Report) . IDCC presently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), while ANET carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

IDCC is a pioneer in advanced mobile technologies that enable wireless communications and capabilities. The company engages in designing and developing a wide range of advanced technology solutions, which are used in digital cellular as well as wireless 3G, 4G and IEEE 802-related products and networks. It has a long-term growth expectation of 15%.

Arista delivered a trailing four-quarter average earnings surprise of 12.87%. It has a long-term growth expectation of 14.41%. It supplies products to a prestigious set of customers, including Fortune 500 global companies in markets such as cloud titans, enterprises, financials and specialty cloud service providers.

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