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George Kurian

Chief Executive Officer & Director, NetApp

Search every verified George Kurian interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In late 2026, George Kurian, CEO of NetApp, received the 2026 Distinguished Leadership Award from The CEO Center at an October ceremony, where he discussed the company's history and his leadership philosophy. He described NetApp's renewal as a story of "patience, conservation and stewardship," contrasting it with what he characterized as the technology industry’s emphasis on disruption and creative destruction. In a related podcast interview with The Conference Board, he said companies that define themselves by a single era risk becoming "the walking dead," and he credited Quaker values of stewardship as influential to his approach. Kurian made several public appearances to discuss NetApp’s product strategy and financial results. At the company’s NetApp Insight conference in late September, he highlighted the importance of "intelligent data infrastructure" for the AI era, arguing that data is the foundation for knowledge and citing industry data challenges as barriers to scaling AI. He also discussed new architectures designed for large-scale AI workloads. On an August earnings call and a September CNBC appearance, Kurian reported a "record-setting" fiscal first quarter, with revenue up 30% year over year, and said the company saw broad-based strength across customer sizes, industries, and geographies. He attributed gross margin gains to a higher mix of software and high-performance product configurations, while declining to quantify the share of revenue driven specifically by AI.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“The first is you cannot pass on your responsibility for safety, security, governance and control of your assets on behalf of your stakeholders. The model builders and the regulators are responsible for making sure that their part of the bargain is supervised and done well. But that doesn't preclude the enterprise from having its own responsibility. And that's the first thing you got to say, hey, listen, we as an ente”

“The prevailing philosophy is companies are great for one era and then that era concludes and they essentially become the walking dead. They can still be profitable but they're not part of the future. When I joined NetApp it was important to me that my children went to Quaker school and one of the things I learned from the Quakers was the importance of stewardship and the importance of being able to curate what was on”

“I think that the AI era requires organizations to be really good stewards of their data because data is the foundation for knowledge and knowledge is the intellectual property. It's the strategic competitive mode. And to have knowledge, you need really good intelligent data infrastructure that not only allows you to extract memory and context from your data, but also to keep it secure, well-governed, and uh you know ”

“AI factories are accelerated computing clouds which have large amounts of GPUs that are being used to today train these large language models, frontier models, but over time will be used by every organization to derive knowledge and insight from their data. They have unique demands. You know GPUs are extraordinarily expensive. So you don't want them to sit idle. They require, you know, solutions that are power effici”

“Today we are introducing a new architecture, one that is disaggregated intelligently so that every single element can be optimized for performance and scaled independently. One that is architected for the performance needs of the 100,000 plus GPU clusters. The unpredictable performance and concurrency requirements of the most demanding agentic workloads and which can assimilate data across tens of thousands of system”

“Data is becoming the constraint to productively scale AI. And you know at NetApp, we know a few things about data. For over 30 years, data infrastructure has always been and remains our focus. And we have been building and innovating solutions with industry leaders like AWS to help businesses take advantage of their data. And now it matters more than ever. You see, 93% of organizations report that at least one form o”

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