AI, Modern Virtualization Driving Explosive Focus On Data: Pure Storage CEO Giancarlo

‘While software may have been “eating the world” in the last decade, it appears that data will be “eating the world” and potentially even “eat software” in the next,’ says Pure Storage CEO and Chairman Charles Giancarlo.

Storage technology developer Pure Storage saw growth in revenue as customers continued to center their IT spending around data management and on modern virtualization, the company’s CEO and Chairman Charles Giancarlo Tuesday told analysts.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has also managed to get past any issues around rising memory and other component prices thanks to its supply chain expertise, Giancarlo said during his prepared remarks for Pure Storage’s third fiscal quarter 2026 earnings conference call.

“Pure Storage delivered a strong Q3, continuing to expand revenue growth as customers increasingly look to Pure to solve their most pressing data management requirements,” he said. “Our results were underpinned by continued strength in enterprise and sustained momentum in our Evergreen//One and modern virtualization solutions, which includes CBS (Cloud Block Store) and Portworx.”

The quarter also saw Pure Storage exceed its full annual forecast of 2 exabytes of hyperscale shipments, and the company expects to ship more in the fourth quarter, Giancarlo said. Taken together, Pure Storage increased its outlook for both fourth fiscal quarter and the full fiscal year 2026, he said.

The growth comes as data is increasingly vital because of the promise of AI and the need for customers to elevate the role of data, Giancarlo said.

“While software may have been ‘eating the world’ in the last decade, it appears that data will be ‘eating the world’ and potentially even ‘eat software’ in the next,” he said.

Data traditionally has been structured below the applications that create it, and locked beneath databases, file systems, and backup systems, each designed for a specific purpose, Giancarlo said. This application-centric model isolates data in silos confined to those services, limiting data visibility and mobility, slowing efficiency and innovation, and preventing companies from realizing the full potential of their information, he said.

As a result, data is repeatedly copied and transformed to be useful for other applications such as analytics and AI, Giancarlo said. Each copy is separately created and maintained, resulting in data that is poorly governed, often over produced, and highly fragmented, he said.

“We believe the era of data being subservient to applications in data center architecture is ending,” he said. “Data, the lifeblood of modern organizations, must now take center stage in data center architecture. In a world where artificial intelligence, automation, and analytics are redefining competitive advantage, enterprises can no longer afford to treat data as captive to specific applications. Data must be architected to stand on its own: self-describing, stateless, and managed globally by policy set in software.”

Giancarlo said Pure Storage’s Enterprise Data Cloud lets organizations access and leverage all their data securely, seamlessly, and in real time regardless of where it originates. Given the right authorizations, any application can access integrated pools of data, giving businesses faster insight and more intelligent decision-making, he said.

“By freeing data from legacy silos, the Enterprise Data Cloud lets companies operate with the same flexibility, scalability, and efficiency as the cloud itself,” he said. “Customers who use our Pure Fusion capability embedded in Purity can now manage their data sets globally with policies embedded in software, rather than by fingers on keyboards, enabling storage and data management that is truly defined by software.”

In terms of modern virtualization, Pure Storage’s Portworx Kubernetes service continues to lead the industry in defining storage in the cloud-native, Kubernetes and container world, including with customers like Nvidia and SiriusXM, Giancarlo said.

Modern virtualization is being driven by the search for alternatives to expensive legacy virtualization models, the rise of containers and KubeVirt, and the significant increase of AI and machine learning built on Kubernetes, he said.

“Portworx is now becoming practically mandatory for any scaled Kubernetes Virtualization deployment,” he said. “As Kubernetes extends beyond virtualization to power modern applications and AI workloads, Portworx’s role continues to grow.”

Pure Storage is also seeing a fast-growing market with neoclouds, which are cloud providers focused on high-performance computing and GPU-as-a-service, Giancarlo said.

“This new generation of specialized, high-performance cloud platforms built for AI, machine learning, and other compute-intensive workloads represent a new segment of cloud infrastructure, driving new benchmarks for performance and scale,” he said.

Pure Storage at the Supercomputing 2025 conference said its FlashBlade//EXA delivered data to thousands of GPUs twice as fast as competing systems in less than half a rack.

“FlashBlade//EXA extends the power of our Purity architecture to these next-generation clouds, pushing the limits of performance for AI and high-performance computing with superior, sustainable throughput and scalability,” he said.

Commodity Pricing Pressure

The macroeconomic environment is characterized by increased commodity pricing and excess demand putting increased pressure on global supply chains, Giancarlo said.

“As in the supply chain crisis of 2021 and 2022, we anticipate both extended component lead times and higher component pricing across the technology industry in the quarters ahead,” he said. “Pure is well prepared for this challenge, with a resilient supply chain, a broad global supplier base, manufacturing sites on three continents, and strong business continuity plans.”

Given the IT industry’s dynamic pricing environment, the effect of commodity pricing tends to affect Pure Storage’s top line more than its gross margin, Giancarlo said. “Thus, we would expect higher commodity pricing to positively affect revenue growth,” he said.

During the question-and-answer part of the conference call, when asked about price impacts from memory price increases, Giancarlo said it is important to understand that the storage market is a dynamic pricing environment.

“Your prices are set at the time of purchase,” he said. “We compete with other vendors, many of whom are cost-plus vendors. And as such, the pricing of our systems tends to float more with commodity pricing. What that means is that commodity pricing tends to be a lesser effect on our gross margins, and, frankly, a greater effect on the overall market. That is, when prices are higher, to the extent that customers require the same amount of capacity, they'll be paying higher prices on average.”

While customers will buy ahead, higher prices generally translate to a rising tide in the storage market overall, of which Pure Storage will be a beneficiary, he said.

Pure Storage has increased its inventory, but not necessarily because of making purchasing decisions ahead of time or on the spot market, Giancarlo said.

“We do believe we've got one of the best supply chain and purchasing organizations, frankly, in our industry, but we're always taking advantage of what of our own internal forecasts of what the market will be like,” he said.

Pure Storage By The Numbers

For its third fiscal quarter 2026, which ended November 2, Pure Storage reported total revenue of $964.5 million, up 16.1 percent over the $831.1 million the company reported for its third fiscal quarter 2025.

This included product revenue of $534.8 million, up from $454.7 million, and subscription services revenue of $429.7 million, up from $376.3 million.

Total revenue beat analyst expectations by $8 million, according to Seeking Alpha.

Pure Storage also reported GAAP net income for the quarter of $54.8 million or 16 cents per share, down from last year’s $63.6 million or 19 cents per share. On a non-GAAP basis, Pure Storage reported net income of $200.2 million or 58 cents per share, up from last year’s $171.4 million or 50 cents per share.

Non-GAAP earnings were in-line with analyst expectations, according to Seeking Alpha.

Pure Storage increased guidance for its fourth quarter and full year 2026.

For its fourth quarter, the company expects revenue to be in the range of $1.02 billion to $1.04 billion, or an approximately 17.1-percent year-over-year increase at the midpoint.

The company also expects full year 2026 revenue to be in the range of $3.63 billion to $3.64 billion, or up 14.7 percent year-over-year at the midpoint. That is a 70 basis points increase from its previously provided revenue guidance of 14 percent year-over-year growth.