NetApp has been named the Presenting Partner of the 2026 NFL Madrid Game, featuring the Atlanta Falcons taking on the Cincinnati Bengals at the Bernabéu Stadium on Sunday, Nov. 8. This multi-year announcement builds on NetApp's role as the league's Official Intelligent Data Infrastructure Partner and Presenting Partner of the inaugural NFL Madrid Game in 2025. The company continues to support the NFL's international games, helping the league build data infrastructure that meets high operational standards.

Partnership Details

The agreement reinforces NetApp's existing relationship with the NFL, which began in April 2025 when it became the Official Intelligent Data Infrastructure Partner. NetApp works with the league to make its data intelligent with powerful and secure infrastructure. The NFL trusts NetApp to build and implement infrastructure that supports league operations, including the storage and security of large volumes of gameday video from every NFL game.

2026 NFL London Games

In addition to the Madrid Game, NetApp will serve as the Presenting Partner for the 2026 NFL London Games. The schedule includes the following matchups:

Ticket Information

Tickets for the 2026 NFL Madrid Game will be available for purchase on specific dates. Hospitality packages will be available starting June 5, while general admission sales open on July 9. Fans can sign up for updates and ticketing information at nfl.com/Madrid.

Executive Commentary

Rafa De Los Santos, country manager of NFL Spain, expressed enthusiasm for the continued partnership, highlighting the landmark moment of the previous game at the Bernabéu. César Cernuda, President at NetApp, emphasized the importance of intelligent data in delivering a consistent experience for football fans, regardless of location. He noted that NetApp is helping the NFL build data infrastructure as the league expands its international presence.

NetApp announced the release of StorageGRID 12.1, designed to help customers scale AI and other modern workloads with a federated global namespace. The new capabilities improve how data is accessed, processed, and managed across distributed environments to support AI data pipelines, data lakes, and modern object-based applications. This release addresses the rapid growth in unstructured data required for AI workloads while managing that data across increasingly distributed hybrid environments.

In its Object Storage Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026 report, Forrester noted that the rise of generative AI has pushed object storage further into an AI-optimized data platform. The updates to NetApp StorageGRID enable organizations to leverage their object data for these emerging uses with new capabilities that simplify operations, improve performance, and reduce costs for data-intensive workloads such as AI.

"With StorageGRID 12.1, NetApp is extending the power of our data platform, giving customers a globally unified namespace to manage data at scale, accelerate AI and analytics workloads, and extract more value from their data wherever it lives," said Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Platform at NetApp.

Key Features and Capabilities

StorageGRID 12.1 introduces several enhancements aimed at large-scale AI operations:

• Global Federated Namespace: Customers can operate at massive scale without rearchitecting applications or workflows. Federated namespaces enable management of multiple globally-distributed StorageGRID systems scaling up to 10 Exabytes in a single namespace.
• Performance and Efficiency: StorageGRID 12.1 delivers up to 400 percent higher throughput compared to version 12.0, depending on workload and object size. The system can now deliver up to 12 TB/s of throughput to AI Factories. Batch operations allow customers to execute operations on billions of objects, and new capabilities enable AI agents to track changes to object storage buckets since the last scan.
• Security and Governance: Expanded controls for regulated environments include multi-admin verification to help accelerate innovation while protecting data.

Industry Recognition

Forrester named NetApp a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Object Storage Solutions, Q2 2026. According to the report, NetApp has a compelling vision of enterprise data infrastructure optimized for hybrid, multicloud, and sovereign use cases. The firm identified NetApp as a strong fit for large enterprises managing distributed, regulated object estates that want to balance governance and hybrid consistency against the need for AI-native storage services.