Super Micro Computer, Inc. Stock

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jen, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Super Micro's First Quarter Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. Joining us today are Charles Liang, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Long, Chief Financial Officer; former Chief Financial Officer, David Weigand; and Michael Staiger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. Thank you. Michael Staiger, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, and welcome to Super Micro's conference call for the First Quarter of Fiscal 2027. As you heard, with me today are Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Long, Chief Financial Officer; and Former Chief Financial Officer, David Weigand.

By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website. Our call is being webcast live on Super Micro's Investor Relations website and will be available for replay until the conference call to discuss our financial results for the second quarter of fiscal '27.

The content of today's call is Super Micro's property. It can't be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations, including with respect to our business plans and performance, ongoing market trends and future financial results. These are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially.

For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release, our most recent Form 10-K and Q and the reports that we may file on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of our statements are made as of today, November 3, 2026, and are based on information currently available to us.

Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our prepared remarks, which is posted on our website.

Our second quarter fiscal '27 quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, December 11, 2026. With that, let me turn the call over to Charles.

Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining us today. Following fiscal 2026 where we nearly doubled our annual revenue. Fiscal '27 is off to a record start. Q1 revenue reached $19.9 billion between the high end of our preannouncement and well ahead of our original outlook of $15 billion. This is a great achievement, and it shows more and more customers prefer our AI and IT total solutions.

Most importantly, our Data Center Building Block Solution, DCBBS, central to this growth, driven deep customer trust and preference, enhancing our profitability and creating sustainable long-term shareholder value. For over 30 years, Super Micro's focus has always been on delivering optimized total solution value to our customers. We will continue leveraging our engineering technology, global resource and manufacturing capacity with high gear to accelerate the customers' deployment.

Moreover, I'm glad that not just large cloud and neocloud, small cloud company, company and organization across enterprise storage, IoT and both country and corporate serving verticals, relying on and adopting Super Micro's total solution every day. We have executed our commitment to drive higher bottom line profitability in Q1. Non-GAAP gross margin expanded by 330 basis points year-over-year to 12.8%. This expansion was driven by healthier customer mix across enterprise and IT accounts, diverse product line build on our system building blocks and a growing revenue contribution from our higher-margin DCBBS mode.

Including our DCBBS hardware, software and unique service stacks. This directly aligned with our strategic roadmap to build a sustainable double-digit gross margin model by delivering superior technology innovation, faster TTM and TTD, faster time to market and faster time to deployment and total solution value proven over more than 2 years in real world customer deployments, DCBBS delivers 4 key values that nontraditional server OEM and overseas CM can match first optimize TTD time to delivery by delivering factory taste plug and play direct scale systems and DCBBS building blocks complete the solution, including data center management software, directly to customer site.

Second, optimize TTO, time-to-online, for shortening life compute readiness from quarters to months and further down to weeks. And third, DCBBS maximize system uptime through building blocks that eliminating [ thermal ] power, software and service bottleneck and number four, lower TCO by slashing energy consumption and facility downtime to accelerate and improve data center profitability, whether our customers are building gigawatt scale AI factory or deploying rapid single container POD solution. Super Micro's DCBBS help build AI infrastructure faster, better and at a lower cost to our customers because optimized hardware alone cannot run an efficient AI data center, managing thousands of [indiscernible] core GPU rack require intelligent real-time software orchestration.

Super cloud composer, SCM, delivers seamless rack scale management and fuller stack hardware facility integration. Super Micro data center manager, SDM, provides complete power and control from individual now up to full building infrastructure for end-to-end hardware life cycle management. And our Super Micro Operation Manager, SOM suite, featuring director and developer console modules enable bare metal model and tokens service with ease for LLM and agentic AI workloads.

Attaching SCM, SDM and SOM directly to our DCBBS portfolio eliminates software fragmentation for our customers. while driving higher value software categories. Furthermore, SCM enhanced [indiscernible] ServiceNow features, AI driven low cost diagnosis, significantly improving data center uptime and giving our customers complete operational confidence.

Equally critical to our total solution advantage is our new expanded global data center service organization. Here, our on-site deployment teams backed by R&D engineers and well-trained post deployment service staff work directly alongside customers' team through service offering to efficiently maximize cluster uptime.

By using automated [indiscernible], our service team continuously monitoring thermal power delivery and node health in real time to solve potential problems before they cause down time. While our dedicated on-site engineer handle deployment validation and immediately hardware maintenance. This proactive high-touch service model builds deeper customer trust, drive high-value recurring service revenue and our highest commitment, bringing a complete peace of mind to our customers through high-quality infrastructure total solutions.

To realize this unmatched solution efficiency, our global manufacturing footprint and scale advancing rapidly. We are actively expanding our physical footprint with major projects underway in Silicon Valley and Taiwan that will add millions of square feet of fully automated production space and for active service bandwidth. Furthermore, we are accelerating our containerized data center production in Asia and U.S.A. together, our global manufacturing and service network put us on track to produce more than 8,000 orders most powerful racks per month, including over 4,000 DLC racks by this December.

On the technology front, Super Micro continues to lead the market across major silicon platforms. We are among the first to market shipping NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks with our DCBBS and DRC2 liquid cooled stack. We recently had also launched the NVIDIA Rubin and Vera Rubin CPU rack, and they are ready to ship now as well. By the way, our optimized [indiscernible] powered solutions also coming soon. For AMD, MI350 and MI355 platform had good momentum now still as we advance to TUS and MI450 total solutions. Additionally, we are progressing Intel Xeon 6+ platform alongside our new ARM HGI CPU-based solutions optimized specifically for agentic AI market.

At the same time, we continue to expand our comprehensive edge in IoT product portfolio, while consistently growing our storage product line, bringing real-time complete package of inferencing capability directly into the intelligent edge. These new products accelerate our strategic focus on our enterprise customers as the company expanded towards scaling agentic model.

Enterprise data governance and workload. We recently announced several major strategic partnerships combining Super Micro's DCBBS, which awarded leading technology company, including Cisco, NetApp, Nutanix and others. With addition any Tier 1 partnership coming soon, we are embedding Super Micro DCBBS footprint deeply into the world's most trusted enterprise. I know some investors and market experts have recently raised concern about AI capital expenditure efficiency and return on investment. Let me be clear. Super Micro is uniquely positioned to thrive in this environment. For over 30 years, we have been focusing on the server and storage industry right here in the United States longer than almost all of our competitors.

Building a mature, well established domestic manufacturing and engineering footprint that our competitors simply hard to match. This U.S. heritage and combined with our time to delivery TTO, time to online, and computing uptime and energy efficiency. Whether our customers building massive Tier 1 AI factory or deploying enterprise agentic AI workload, Super Micro ensures their capital investment convert into revenue faster and more costly efficiently than anyone else, we believe.

We are driving strong internal discipline through continuous operational optimization, factory automation and scale development through technology process refinement and training. We have successfully reduced our inventory and production turn along time from about 100 days to 74 days over the past 3 quarters. Looking ahead, our target is to further streamline our inventory and production cycle down to 50 days over the coming quarters. It's not easy, but we believe we will achieve it.

This ongoing efficiency optimization will continue to strengthen Super Micro's cash flow, working capital cycle and drive higher bottom line profitability. As a matter how competitive the market gets, more customers will adopt Super Micro DCBBS that include data center end-to-end hardware management software and end-to-end data center services.

Now let's turn to our outlook for fiscal year 2027. While our overall demand and our growth momentum remained very strong across every front, we must be recognized that key component shortage continue to impact delivery time line across the IT industry, even GPU. A new customer program and strategic ecosystem partnership are ramping strongly, but we want to remain prudent about some key components, availability and volatile pricing based on what we see today.

We anticipate our fiscal 2027 revenue target will be in the range of $72 billion to $82 billion. That is about 12% higher than the target we set one quarter ago. Before I turn the call over, I want to highlight a few important leadership update. First, we are pleased to welcome a long time industry technology leader, Shesha Krishnapura to our Board of Directors, bringing deep data center operational experience and expertise to support our theory.

Second, my sincere thanks to David Weigand for his 6 years of CFO leadership during our period of massive growth. We look forward to his ongoing support and contribution in optimizing our operation to a much bigger scale. Finally, I'm decided to introduce Mark Long new CFO, whose dedicated, I guess, 30, 40 years, of tech and financial leadership will be a strong path for our next phase of growth. Now I will turn the call to Mark.

Thank you, Charles, and good afternoon, everyone. This is my first call with you, so let me take 2 minutes before we get to the numbers. I've spent much of my career in technology infrastructure finance, including as Chief Financial Officer of a public company in this industry. What brought me to Super Micro is that the hardest part is already built, deep engineering advantage, a real lead in liquid cooling and rack scale integration and a key position in the largest infrastructure build-out of our careers. .

What the company needs now is financial capability that matches its engineering and operating capability. I'm excited to join Super Micro at this pivotal time and look forward to helping Charles and the team continue to deliver an expanding portfolio of innovative solutions to a growing global customer base, including some of the largest, most demanding customers who are shaping the future of the AI era.

To do that will require continued financial discipline, transparency, deeper engagement with stakeholders. -- working capital management and capital structure optimization, which will be my areas of focus. Now to the quarter. Total revenue was $19.9 billion, up 298% year-over-year and 79% sequentially. That is above our guidance range of $14.5 billion to $15.5 billion and above the preliminary range of $18.5 billion to $19.5 billion we provided on October 20.

As Charles noted, approximately $2.3 billion represented deployments originally scheduled for earlier periods due to customer and data center readiness. Excluding that, underlying revenue was approximately $17.6 billion. AI solutions contributed approximately 71% of revenue compared with 59% in Q4. Based on our current backlog, we expect AI-related solutions to represent approximately 70% to 80% of revenue for fiscal 2027. Enterprise and channel revenue was $4.9 billion or 25% of revenue, up 229% year-over-year and down 12% sequentially. OEM appliance and large data center revenue was $14.7 billion or 74%, up 32% year-over-year and 167% sequentially driven by production ramps on several large AI data center design wins.

The 5G telco and edge segment, while still small in relative terms, grew significantly both year-over-year and sequentially. By geography, the United States represented 80% of revenue; Europe, 11%; and Asia, 6%; and the rest of the world, 3%. The United States grew 771% year-over-year and 103% sequential. While the U.S. remains the largest market for large-scale AI data centers, we are seeing growing momentum in other regions as large customers expand globally and governments and enterprises plan and fund significant AI data centers in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

In the quarter, one large data center customer represented 44% of revenue. compared with 28% for fiscal 2026 as a whole. In our 10-Q, you will also see that 2 customers accounted for 49% and 17% of accounts receivable at quarter end. I want to provide more context for this. Concentration at this level is a consequence of the scale at which AI infrastructure is now being built. A single deployment today can exceed our total quarterly revenue from just 1 year ago. We expect concentration to stay elevated while these build-outs run and to moderate as our enterprise and sovereign businesses grow.

What matters alongside the concentration is the quality of the exposure. So let me do that.

Deferred revenue increased by approximately $3.1 billion during the quarter, an overwhelming majority of which reflects customers paying advance of delivery. Days sales outstanding improved from 59 days to 36 days. We recorded no material credit losses in the quarter. On large deployments, we frequently require deposits and often build against delivering milestones. We evaluate counterparty credit before committing manufacturing capacity and critical components, and we maintained a $1.8 billion receivables purchase facility that gives us flexibility in both cash timing and credit exposure.

We have declining business in this market on terms we were not comfortable with. And in the current environment, I expect we will continue to make that choice. Non-GAAP gross margin was 12.8%, that is 200 to 240 basis points above our guidance range of 10.4% to 10.8% and 330 basis points above the first quarter of last year. On a GAAP basis, gross margin was 12.7%. It is also down 480 basis points from the 17.6% we reported in Q4. And I want to take that apart because a single factor explanation would be misleading.

The key factor impacting gross margin was the Q1 AI revenue mix which increased from 59% in Q4 to 71% in Q1. The customer and product mix within our Q1 business was weighted towards large AI deployments, which carry lower gross margins than the more diversified enterprise and channel business. Benefits from tariff relief and lower inventory reserves during the quarter were largely offset by certain lower-margin deferred revenues we were recognized during the quarter.

I want to be precise about 1 point because I know how the mix figures can be read. The sequential decline is not evidence that AI platform revenue lacks margin. It reflects which customers took delivery in which order. The clearest way to see the underlying trend is to look at the last 2 quarters together, which neutralizes the deferral timing. Across Q4 and Q1 combined, revenue was approximately $31.1 billion and non-GAAP gross margin was approximately 14.5%. For the same 2 quarters a year earlier, revenue was approximately $10.8 billion, and gross margin was approximately 9.5%.

On that normalized basis, revenue nearly tripled and gross margin improved by roughly 500 basis. We continue to demonstrate significant operating leverage. Revenue grew 298% year-over-year against an 89% increase in non-GAAP operating expenses. GAAP operating expenses were $477 million, up 67% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $384 million, up 89% year-over-year and 8% sequentially.

The sequential increases reflect higher headcount costs and research and development spending as we invest in multiple new platforms for AI data center and enterprise applications. Non-GAAP operating margin was 10.9% compared with 14.3% in Q4. Here, too, the 2-quarter view is more useful across Q4 and Q1 combined non-GAAP operating expenses were approximately $741 million or about 2.4% of revenue, and non-GAAP operating margin was approximately 12.1% compared with roughly 5.4% for the same 2 quarters a year earlier.

We intend to keep investing in R&D, field service and a global footprint, and we expect operating expenses to keep growing well below the rate of revenue. Other income and expense was a net expense of $34 million, consisting of $49 million of interest expense and other expense offset by $83 million of interest expense on our convertible notes and revolving credit facilities. The tax provision was $435 million on a GAAP basis and $455 million on a non-GAAP basis, with an effective tax rate of 21.4% on both basis.

I would like to expand on some points made in the last earnings call regarding earnings per share because our capital structure now has a moving part that I do not think is well understood. We calculate earnings per share using the 2-class method, which reflects the mandatory convertible preferred stock we issued in Q4. That instrument carries a fixed dividend of approximately $75 million per quarter and converts to common stock in June 2029.

Between now and then, both the dividend and the allocation of earnings to that participating security to produce earnings available to common shareholders this quarter by approximately $312 million in aggregate. GAAP diluted earnings per share were $1.75 against guidance of $0.89 to $0.98. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share were $1.81 against guidance of $1.01 to $1.10. GAAP basic earnings per share were $1.92.

Now to working capital, which I think will help explain key elements of how we operate our business. Our cash conversion cycle improved from 149 days to 97 days, a 52-day improvement in a single quarter. At our Q1 revenue run rate, that difference represents roughly $10 billion of working capital the business would otherwise have needed to fund. The cash flow statement shows this. We used $434 million of cash in operations on $19.9 billion of revenue. For all of fiscal 2026, we used [ $6.8 ] billion on $39.1 billion of revenue.

Capital expenditure in the quarter was $47 million, so free cash flow was negative $481 million against negative $7 billion for fiscal 2026. Let me break down the 52 days, including both the positives and the areas for potential improvement. Days of inventory improved 45 days to 74 days. Days sales outstanding improved 23 days to 36 days, helped by faster collections and by customer prepayments. Days payable outstanding moved against us from 29 days to 13, days which consumed roughly $3 billion and reflects timing of payments to suppliers in a supply-constrained environment.

The largest single driver was customer prepayment. Deferred revenue increased approximately $3.1 billion in the quarter. Accounts receivable grew $3.6 billion and inventory grew $2.5 billion to support the revenue ahead of us, and prepayments funded most of that build. We expect the cash conversion cycle for the current quarter to be within the band of plus or minus 10% versus Q1, which enables us to appropriately manage our working capital while also executing against attractive market opportunities.

We ended the quarter with $6.9 billion of cash and cash equivalents. Bank borrowing and convertible notes totaled $8.6 billion for net debt of $1.7 billion compared with $1.2 billion at the end of Q4. Inventory was $15.1 billion, up from $12.9 billion. Built to support the revenue we expect in coming quarters. We are compliance with all covenants at quarter end.

On capital structure more broadly, we are starting from a strong foundation. The $5.6 billion we raised in June was raised specifically to fund the working capital behind the orders we are now delivering. As we identify high growth -- high quality growth opportunities, we will optimize our capital structure to support them, and we will do that in ways that fortify the balance sheet without taking on unnecessary costs. That means matching the duration and the form of our funding to the working capital and the assets it supports and being deliberate about when and whether we access markets.

I will be transparent with you every quarter about dilution, maturities and available capacity. We ended the quarter with a record backlog, providing stronger visibility for the current quarter and the remainder of the fiscal year. Turning to guidance. For the second quarter of fiscal 2027, we expect net sales of $19.5 billion to $21.5 billion and gross margin of 12% to 12.5%. We expect GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.59 to $1.83 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.66 to $1.90. That guidance assumes GAAP operating expenses of approximately $455 million, including approximately $102 million of stock-based compensation, which is excluded from non-GAAP.

We expect other income and expense, including interest expense, to result in a net expense of approximately $58 million. GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates of approximately [ 21% ] and GAAP diluted share count of approximately 753 million and non-GAAP diluted share count of approximately 769 million, preferred dividends of approximately $75 million and capital expenditure of $70 million to $80 million. For the full fiscal year, we are raising our revenue outlook to $72 billion to $82 billion from $65 billion to $72 billion.

We expect full year gross margin of 11.8% to 12.2%. Let me connect that to the quarter we just reported. Q1 included approximately $2.3 billion of catch-up from prior period deployments. So underlying revenue was approximately $17.6 billion. The full year range does not assume that catch-up repeats. It does assume continued sequential growth in underlying demand, and it reflects materially better visibility into customer deployment schedules than we had 90 days ago.

Our business continues to strengthen and momentum is building for fiscal 2027. Although we are gated by supply constraints and data center readiness, and we are focused on disciplined execution, creditworthy counterparties and expanding our higher-margin revenue streams, on margin, I want to be straightforward about what the full year range implies. With Q1 at 12.8% and Q2 guided to 12% to 12.5%, the full year range implies gross margin in the second half below the first half. That is a mix effect.

We expect AI solutions to move toward the upper end of the 70% to 80% range as the large deployments in our backlog shipped and those carry lower gross margin than enterprise and channel verticals. Within each category, we expect margins to hold or improve. What governs the range is not demand, and it is not our ability to build. It is the pace at which customer facilities become ready to receive what we've already manufactured and the availability of key composites.

The finding constraints on AI build-outs across this industry right now, are land, power and data center shells. We have better visibility into that than we did, and we will update you as the year progresses. Let me close where I started. This was a quarter of strong growth with high-quality customers. Revenue nearly quadrupled year-over-year. Gross margin came in well above our guidance, and customer prepayments funded most of the working capital needed to deliver in.

Behind those results is a broad and innovative portfolio from DCBBS rack scale and liquid cool systems to enterprise storage, edge and software that positions us for the most demanding workloads and the widest range of use case in the AI building. My focus going forward is the one I described at the outset, financial discipline so that growth is profitable growth, transparency so that you can see how this business works from quarter to quarter, including the timing effects that moves our numbers.

Deeper engagement with all of our stakeholders, working capital management, building on the improvement in our cash conversion cycle this quarter and a capital structure optimized to support high-quality growth from a strong foundation. I'm looking forward to meeting many of you over the coming months. Michael, we are ready for questions.

Great. Jen, let's poll for questions. .

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs.

First, I want to ask just about the raised revenue outlook. I understand that land, power and data center shells are the binding constraints here. But I wanted to understand in your full year outlook and then in your pipeline, what share of those projects do you have line of sight into the offtakers and the committed volume there? And then I have a follow-up question.

Yes. I mean, as you know, the power and even GPU some component shortage, right? But because our solution outperformed the industry solution, especially with our DCBBS. DCBBS Not just provide data center hardware building block, software and service, help customer build the data center quicker and also keep their computing power, uptime much better. So indeed, we continue to gain more customers and gain more share. So we feel pretty optimistic for continued market share growth.

And then as a follow-up, could you talk more about the customer prepayments in the quarter? And how we should think about that continuing to support your working capital efficiency going forward? Is that something we can expect in the value that DCBBS and the market share gain strategy that you've talked about?

Yes. As you know, I mean, now cash flow a little bit tied to total company by the Super Micro because we have a better total solution, again, our DCBBS that attract a lot of customers. So basically, we see a good signS. Most of our customers are able to pay us on time. And we feel very started to continue to grow our business. Mark, do you want to add anything.

Yes, I think the advantage, as Charles pointed out, is really around the quality of the customer base. So very large creditworthy customers who pay very quickly. They provide very strong cash flow for us. But the broad customer base is providing more prepayments. And that discipline enables us to fund a lot more of this working capital. And I think you should expect that to continue.

So we feel like we're in a very good position. The company has done a lot since they raised capital in the summer. And since the cash conversion cycle has improved. So working capital efficiency has gone up substantially.

Yes. We improve our business in terms of cash flow in 2 areas. One is we improve inventory and production turnaround time from about 100 days to now 70 days, and we believe we will be able to continue to improve that production and inventory turnaround time. Second phase, second point, as Mark just said, we get in a higher-quality customer, and those customers pay on time, or even pay quick turnaround. So we are very solid in this area. .

Your next question comes from the line of Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital.

Congrats on the progress and Mark, welcome. I have -- yes, 2, if I could. I guess, the first one, Mark, is just on the gross margin and the way to think about the dynamics that are layering in through the balance of the fiscal year. Correct me if I'm wrong here. I actually have to hit the midpoint of your guide while down in the second half of the year, sort of flat around 12% in the next 3 quarters.

So correct me if that's wrong. And then really, the question is, you talked about AI mix sort of being a factor in there. What -- could you share a little bit about inside of the AI customer base, like what are the moving parts on the margins? I think Charles in the past has talked about improvement in AI margins sort of as in the go forward and just interested to know what the dynamics at play are, are there as you go through the rest of the fiscal year inside the AI margins? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Yes. As I just shared, in last 3 quarters or 4 quarters, our production time and also our production quality, [indiscernible] dramatically improved, and that make our turnaround time quicker and make the customer happier because of beta TPD and better TPO help customer time to online. So customers appreciate that, plus our DCBBS software and service that help customer further. And better quality customer, we continue to gain more customers, especially including the enterprise agentic customers. So all those are positive impacting our business.

Yes. And I think just to kind of build on what Charles said, in terms of the guide for the year, what you're seeing is we have good line of sight. And now the business is stabilizing and kind of has this foundation in this 12% gross margin range with room as we continue to diversify our customer base and our product sets to expand those gross margins further. .

So the precise modeling, you're relatively close on your original question. But for us, the visibility is very strong. And as Charles pointed out, the gross margin across all of our customer categories, hasn't improved. That's really the important thing. And this is a function of what Charles was talking about in terms of our great engineering, our great product set and the execution of the team. So we feel like we're in a very good position at this scale, and we see enormous opportunities going forward.

yes, like our DCBBS, we provide not just data center building product solution hardware components, but also software also help customer kind of keep up time. So all those almost become one of our business moats. So customers like our product -- more and more customers like our solution.

That's really great context. And the quick follow-up is what's the reasonable expectation for opportunity with the CPU business, just with all the structural tailwinds as you go through the fiscal year here.

Yes. As you know, agentic AI is getting very popular. So we're getting a lots of customers, including a lots of our enterprise customers, they are buying our CPU-based solution, including our CPU based AMD, including NVIDIA Vera, our NVIDIA Vera solution is ready and including ARM solution. So we see a much stronger CPU demand now and looking forward.

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Cardoso with JPMorgan.

And Mark looking forward to working with you. Maybe just for my first, if I could. It sounds like in your prepared remarks, you're not including any of more catch-up or deferred deliveries in the guidance. But I guess maybe first question here is just, can you just clarify if there are still deferred deliveries that are remaining and just not embedded in the outlook? And then the second portion of that question is, as we kind of strip that out of the numbers, you're still kind of implying a moderation in growth coming into the second half of the year versus the first half. So maybe can you just walk us through the dynamics that are influencing that. And if it has anything to do maybe with the concentration with your largest customer here may be fading going into the back half? And then I do have a follow-up.

Yes. I think the key point about deferred revenue historically kind of looking back, was that there was this set of deliveries and deployments that have been delayed, and they have been carried over from prior quarters. In a typical quarter, you will have some revenue recognition based on deliveries and you may have 1 or 2 deployments that are delayed. But those were -- that was a larger than typical amount of revenue that had been deferred. And when that was released, that caused a number of things.

Revenue went up. And as we mentioned, that was margin dilutive on an overall basis. But going forward, we don't expect the same types and the same magnitude of delayed deployments through the deferred revenue. And most of the deferred revenue is either customer prepayments or we have our service and software revenue that we typically defer over a number of periods.

Yes. The good thing is since we introduced DCBBS, some of our customers and some of our even our internal people are little bit confused, So that's why they kind of have a certain argument about when to recognize. But now our DCBBS is a much mature business. So not just our internal people are now familiar with our DCBBS and customers understand which services they buy, which services they did not buy. So we should not offer them. So since it's getting much clearer, much mature. So that will have our deferred revenue program.

Yes. And the second question regarding guidance implying moderation in growth in the second half, what you're really hearing is just our sort of range of expectations based on the supply constraints and trying to gauge where the data center readiness for large deployments will land us. But as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, demand remains extremely strong and especially the interest in the DCBBS product portfolio.

Got it. Very clear. And then maybe as my second one, just dovetailing off of that a little bit, and maybe this is a 2 parter as well. But you're talking about maybe shortages here going into -- or kind of the supply tightness, I guess, in terms of the total ecosystem. Can you maybe just touch on what's the most binding constraint as you think about the 2Q and second half outlook?

Is it largely associated with the GPUs? Or is it other elements on the component side? And then the second question is just more around, obviously, within this backdrop of shortages, pricing has obviously been a strong element in terms of pass-through. Any way you can kind of help us think through as we think about your '27 outlook, how much of the growth is being driven by units as opposed to cost pass-through?

Very good question. I mean the reason why we have a conservative number for annual revenue, $72 billion to $82 billion because we are concerning about some key components shortage and also macro economy. So if the component shortage won't be a big issue, and if the macroeconomy is healthy then for sure, our second half will be much bigger than our first half. So we hope so, and that's why we are very optimistic to see our second half have a much better performance than the first half. And if that's the case, $72 billion to $82 billion becomes very, very conservative.

Yes. And I think your point about the growth in ASPs really driven by the cost of key components that has been going up sometimes more than quarterly -- our outlook does not -- for the second half does not encompass significant growth in ASPs. So again, we have a relatively conservative approach there. And we're really looking at the details of customer deployments, what they need, which product sets, what our production capacity is and kind of how to manage into that. And as Charles pointed out, our demand far outstrips the availability of key components.

Your next question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

Congrats on the role, and I look forward to working with you. Maybe I'll ask you my first question. As you look out over the next 12 months, do you think Super Micro has enough cash and cash flow to self-fund the investments that are needed to support the strong growth that you're seeing, what would cause you to raise more capital? And do you have a preference for debt versus equity? And I have a follow-up.

Very good question. As you know, by end of the last quarter, our cash is $6 billion. We never have so much cash in the bank. So indeed, the cash flow at this moment, we don't worry. Even in the second half continue to grow strongly if the macroeconomy is healthy. Our cash flow is in much strong position than before ever. .

Yes, as Charles pointed out, I mean starting with $6.9 billion of cash puts us in a very good position. As we mentioned, our working capital efficiency has gone up, our ability to fund our working capital needs through our focus on high-quality customers and some customer prepayments.

That puts us in a great position so that we can optimize our capital structure. We can think about trade-offs if we have very attractive opportunities that require incremental funding we have our $1.8 billion working capital facility, and we have the opportunity to access other markets. As you point out, both the credit and equity markets, at this point, we don't have any plans to consider equity raises. And as far as the debt markets, I think we would look at kind of what is available and how it would best position the company for continued success and provide us with the right leverage structure.

Due to time constraints, we'll be taking one final question. This question comes from the line of George Notter with Wolfe Research.

It's Bernan Rogers on for George. I guess just a question on what's changed in your conversations with customers in the last 90 days in order to get this better visibility. Like is this a feature of today's market, like customers are extending the forecast time lines that they're giving you? Or is this sort of more of a shift in how you're managing the business?

Yes. As we mentioned, we have a strong back order. And so we have a choice to select customers and customer order quality, customer quality is very important to us. So we have a chance to selective from some point of view. .

Yes. And I think as Charles pointed out, we are getting better visibility from a number of our customers, some very large, some moderately large, and we're getting visibility across geographies and...

Enterprises.

Yes. And the growth of the enterprise business is another factor that will provide enhanced visibility and stability to our overall revenue stream.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Welcome to the Super Micro fireside chat at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of having Mike Staiger, SVP of Corporate Development of Super Micro. My name is Kat Murphy, and I cover SMCI and IT hardware here at Goldman Sachs. We have about 35 minutes for today's presentation inclusive of Q&A at the end.

So to start, Mike, thank you very much for being here. I appreciate the opportunity to get to talk to you in front of the audience.

Let's start on the raised fiscal '27 guide? Really impressive to see on the earnings print last quarter, expectations were $65 billion to $72 billion in revenue, which implies another year of substantial growth on top of revenue nearly doubling or more than doubling in the last year. Can you talk about the major building blocks that are supporting that outlook as we look forward to next year?

Yes. Great. Thanks for having us. It's good to see you and catch up. So I think it's not lost on anyone that demand is actually pretty excellent. I think a couple of years ago, we were $15 billion, and now we're on our way doing $15 billion per year, and now we're on our way to do $15 billion for 1 quarter and beyond.

So the building blocks, obviously, the foundation here is that AI adoption is underway. We're leading the charge with innovation. We have a whole host of different various solutions that we're bringing to market with our partners.

The order book, obviously, at $60 billion underpins the guidance for the year. We're pretty focused on scheduled build-out, so to speak, for our end customers. There's a diversification within that customer base that's really helpful. So we see a broadening out. And it looks to be a multiyear cycle and customers are looking for solutions as opposed to components, so to speak. So it's pretty awesome.

In terms of thinking about this growth going forward, too. You underline the healthy demand, the diversification of customers. How should we think about maybe put more simply, parsing the growth between TAM expansion and then Super Micro gaining share? You're obviously going after this opportunity in enterprise, which is not a place you played historically. How should we think about the balance of those 2 driving the growth next year?

So there's multiple layers of that, which is awesome, but the TAM itself has been segmented out as $2 trillion to $4 trillion build. And whether or not the market truly believes that's the TAM, but if we're thinking it's $2 trillion to $4 trillion. And we're 10% of that market, and we said this before. We're 10% now of the market itself, which implies that we're a significant enterprise player. So we'll go back to that. But that gives us a $200 billion look.

And I think that there is more opportunity for us because as we move forward in this market, our focus is not -- our focus is on solutioning the customer. And if we're solutioning the customer, by nature, we should be gaining share. And I think the underpinnings of this is that, we're transitioning from a traditional compute stack that people have been following for years, server storage, networking, et cetera. And the deployment model could change to next-generation innovative solutions, which we've been leading the charge. This is why it's been driving the growth. The customers are wanting application-optimized solutions for AI and beyond.

And we're developing those with a whole host of partners and we can get into that later. But so from that perspective, that underpins the growth on the innovation front. So we look to capture more customers. So we're focused on the customer as opposed to are we going to -- how much of the market share we can gain, so to speak. So there's a lot of nuance to that, but I guess we can dive into that with whatever next question we have.

Yes. Maybe a part of that, that would be helpful if you could touch on. Super Micro's right to win historically has been your engineering-led model that's been differentiated relative to some of the domestic OEM peers that you have. As AI infrastructure becomes increasingly more complex with every chipset with every requirement, how does your engineering focus do you feel differentiate you versus some of your peers?

Well, I think it's major, right? The time to market, the time to engineering -- the time to solution, excuse me, is a material differentiator from what we're doing. So when we're working with multiple large name partners, many of them are here today, they all have variations of their different chipsets and different platforms and those platforms all need different motherboard architecture, framework. And we're able to manage or understand that element and put into a product -- into a system.

So you take any chip, any server, into any rack, into any data center as a whole total solution or an AI factory. So the engineering piece of this is what leads customers to us and which leads us to gain share. And we've always done this. We've done this in the enterprise day 1 back in the days of X86. Well, X86 is still the platform, but a big platform. We were able to put more compute in a system that with a lower power draw with better thermal dynamics at a lower cost. At that time, no one cared about power and cooling.

So the DNA of the company is all about packaging these solutions to enable the customer to do more with their gear. So if you take that ethos, so to speak, and you move forward and you can productize that and you see the AI platforms actually requiring what we're able and capable of doing where half of our staff is engineering. Our focus is on this. We're sitting in Silicon Valley. All the major partners there, we can flex incredibly fast. And so we're bringing brand-new technology to the market in volume and at scale, and that's a great viewpoint for customers and they notice.

Part of the mix story should also help one of the main investor questions around Super Micro, which is around your margin profile. Incredibly strong margins last quarter, beat guidance expectations, I think, 17.5% gross margin. And you've talked about returning the margin profile for the company back to stable double digits next year. What are some of the structural changes within the business versus maybe 1 or 2 years ago that gives you line of sight into that stable double-digit margin framework? And is it mix? Is it the plan being executed as expected? Like anything to share there to give us confidence that Super Micro will get back into that range sustainably?

Yes. So I think the backdrop of the market in early days, there was a few large buyers and a lot of folks who wanted to serve those buyers. And so there was a lot of price competition in that segment. And I think many of the larger buyers realize that when they were getting, I think you used the word systems or reference architecture that they had to do a tremendous amount of work to stand that up. And I think one of our partners has mentioned that if it's -- if you have 8 racks and it takes you 30 days to make them operational. It's like a $3 million.

So some of these operators are looking at 100 to 1,500 rack deployments. You're talking hundreds of millions of dollars if you cannot stand up your infrastructure immediately. So I think the end market is looking for time to online, time to revenue. So if you think about what's happening at the neocloud level and you see some of these major contracts where these neoclouds are -- many of them growing -- that we're serving, they're getting hyperscaler contracts.

So in essence, our systems at the neoclouds are serving hyperscalers. So they need to get those systems up and running immediately, time to market. So when we solution those customers, there's a solution value. We're putting more content into those particular packages for the customers that form a DCBBS. And if you go back a year, 1.5 years ago, we told the market that we were going to do DCBBS, building blocks and we have power cooling, CDUs or Rear Door Heat Exchangers, storage switching and software to integrate these things. So when we put together a system or a solution for a customer, the integration, the L11/L12 element of this, they can turn it on day 1.

And more importantly, they get time to revenue. But the more important element of this is the reliability of that integrated system that significantly -- we believe it's significantly higher than competitors. And so if your system availability is there for you and you can charge dollars for it, downtime kills you, right? You're losing revenue. So they're gaining the capability quicker, and they have greater reliability. So the cost savings to the customer is significant. So that's the solution value.

And so that's supportive of the double-digit gross margin element that we've pointed to the market. We guided to -- we'll say, in the midpoint 10.6% for the quarter. There is an element of, there is a downtick and there's some contracts in there that potentially dug through from the prior quarter that put some pressure on that. But the focus is the solution to the customer. And as we do more on the DCBBS, and we have more components that are more integrated, that we're putting -- we're doing more ourselves. Those margin profile is higher.

So that mix and the customer mix will add to the diversification of the customer base helps. And so we're doing more than just serving neoclouds, enterprises and sovereigns -- the enterprises and sovereigns and inclusive of the neoclouds do need these solutions because everyone wants to get their systems up and running and serve their customer because they're serving their customer. It's a revenue generator or it's a productivity enhancement for the organization, and that's kind of the direction we're going. That's what we're focused on.

You're talking about solutions architecture. You made reference to DCBBS or the Data Center Building Block Solutions. For people who may be less familiar, can you define exactly what that is for Super Micro? And to the extent that these are things that Super Micro is doing internally versus partnering with some third parties to bring in capabilities, talk about that mix and how it makes more attractive the offering to enterprise?

So we're initially engaged with the market and the initial build-out, reference architecture and making that racks for customers and delivering racks. And I mentioned before that just delivering racks technically isn't enough. We saw customers struggle with the cooling, with the power, power shelves, et cetera, with implementing the cabling and the backplane or the cable management, the management software for the cluster itself.

And so what we've done is develop productize those elements so that we can stand up those systems quicker. And the more important element is that if we control all those elements, then we can get to revenue to the customer quicker and it's a lot easier to match order to time frame so that they can get online faster. So it's -- a product suite is inclusive of storage and switches. Downstream, we'll probably have more switches. But at the same time, the software tightly connect us and tightly integrates with this.

And ultimately, we'll get to a point where we can go across, let's say, factories that are building solutions and do different architectures or different families and cross plane to manage the footprint because we think customers are going to ultimately have, whether it's GenAI on site or agentic CPUs or traditional CPUs, all those things will be very difficult to manage. So we're focused on downstream, making those things work collectively for the customer.

So it's a total solution strategy for the customer. And we haven't given out like what part would be the P&Q of each individual item that will be pretty complicated. But it's clearly working and we've shown the muscle strength of going from a lower margin or we had a headwind in quarter that scared people, to be honest. And now we're on a trajectory that the solution is looking solid from a margin perspective. So it's a great thing for us, and we're looking forward to doing more with our partners as more product comes on stream.

Got you. I want to touch on the software piece. But first, could you just confirm on the ways in which you're selling these DCBBS products or components within that solution? Is this all Super Micro branded cooling and power? Or are there other parties that...

We design almost everything, and we do have partners that help solutioning pieces. So it will be a Super Micro design, and it ultimately, if it's something that we think that we can do in-house, we'll do it. There's many other pieces that we do. And again, it's part of the solution. So they are all integrated together and they work better. So again, if a customer wanted to DIY, and we've seen this, there's all kinds of mismatches and issues and problems. So we've been able to essentially productize this. So times online for the customer is significant. So it's all about innovation and staying at the forefront of the curve.

And we've seen customers go order various different flavors or types of GPUs from our partners that match workloads. And so we're able to flex and within whether NVIDIA or AMD or Intel or Arm-based, be able to flex to those products. So the breadth of product is amazing, and the use cases are expanding or broadening out. And we think it's a multiyear cycle, and we have all kinds of solutions for those customers. And that's why they're coming to us and inclusive of expanding our go-to-market presence in the enterprise, our service capability in the enterprise, et cetera.

On the software front, you've talked in the past about early traction in the suite of management software that Super Micro sells. There's the SuperCloud Composer, there's the Data Center Manager. There's the Orchestration Manager. Why is Super Micro the right person to sell this to your end customers? And who -- what are the other solutions that they may have? It's a very small share of revenue today, but it's a place where you're investing. Anything to share on that front?

Well, so software and services, I think in fiscal '26, we just finished $538 million, so -- and growing. So it could be a substantial part of the business. It's obviously -- it's higher margin. Software margins are great. Everyone knows that. But from a standpoint of the integration and all the control plane for the racks and the cooling storage, et cetera, it's internalized in that system. So it makes it seamless for the customer.

And so we think it's a pretty essential toolkit. We've integrated that with VCF. And so that's VMware, VCF AI factory. And so it's another proof point from a standpoint of partnering and an expansion in the enterprise where the factories and the management plane from a VMware perspective, we can reach more customers than the enterprise.

Is this something that you sell or ship directly? Or is it part of how you're winning...

It's part of the solution. It will go with our systems. And ultimately, I believe it's potential to cross different brand clusters. But we'll see. But right now, it's a part of the total solution package.

Going back to this notion of DCBBS opening up the aperture of the types of customers that you can serve. Is this an attach -- is this an opportunity to win new customers? Or are you seeing your existing maybe larger, potentially more cost-sensitive customers looking now at the broader scope of Super Micro's offering and maybe engaging in different product lines and features?

I think the first engagement process is I need an AI solution, I need AI factory, I need a system. So it's kind of a tailwind to all of that. So it's inclusive of it as opposed to a point product. But I will say that we have gone to customers and upgraded or enhance their footprint, whether they needed some cooling solutions or some power solutions. We can do that. We can probably do that across multi-platforms. So we've done it, but it really starts with the customer and putting in a new deployment or upgrading the existing deployment that were inclusive of a total solution for those customers.

I want to go back to talking about your strength in neoclouds. Third-party data estimates 40% market share in the NeoCloud and server business for Super Micro. There is an investor concern that as some of these most mature companies continue to grow, most mature neoclouds a little -- that they will try to engage more with a Taiwanese ODM or a lower cost operating model. You talked about the importance of time to first token. But how does that change over time when the scale of the deal may be less favorable from a unit economics perspective for Super Micro?

So that concern was around at $7 billion at $15 billion at $22 billion, at $39 billion, and it's going to exist at $68 billion. So there's a certain function that they may serve again, shipping racks to customers, but we feel that there is a significant amount of customers that need that solution. So we will get them up to online time to online quicker and faster with the L11/L12 validation.

As the complexity continues to increase, it becomes difficult, more difficult for customers to keep pace. We're keeping that pace. The second phase of this is that the notion that there's going to be one platform that everyone lands on. It's clearly not the case when you see hyperscalers trying to do -- they're doing their own silicon and a number of platforms that are available to put into a rack or to put into a solution or a factory is significantly expanding. So we're expanding with all those types of solution sets.

And so that fragmentation or expansion is something that would be difficult to theoretically mass produce. So we're just going to serve the customer with the solutions because we'll be there and ready at day 1. And if it's part of the package, and we're providing value, we'll be fine, and there's business for them to do on the ODM front, and there's plenty of business for us to do from a solutions front. So the distinction between ODM and OEM, we're just trying to serve the customer, right? We're trying to make -- enable our partners. And I think we're doing a fantastic job with that.

On the point of chip diversity and even the custom silicon that's coming out of some of the hyperscalers. What Super Micro's opportunity to go after? I think Charles has in the past called the design for manufacturing opportunity set. Is that still something that's in the playbook? Or is that less a focus now that the enterprise opportunity is really starting to get some legs?

So the interesting thing is there's like the engineering desire to solve problems and work with the innovation, the engineers are all in on that. There's things I'm sure that we're doing that are not necessarily in the public domain. So there's nothing that we're not capable of. So it isn't -- we're going to move away from this or that. But right now, we're serving quite a bit of -- quite a bit of -- we have many partners that we're serving many customers that we're serving.

So our hands are pretty full in attacking that. But at the same time, customers will continue to come to us and say, "Can you do this for us?" And if we can come to terms and agreement, then it's -- I think that there's plenty of opportunities. So when you think about the $2 trillion to $4 trillion number that was just being parsed about, I think the sky is a limit from where we can be in a couple of years.

In terms of some of the constraints that are impacting Super Micro's ability to reach all of this demand from all of the various different vectors of growth you're going after. How do you think about the engineering intensity, the potential investment that needs to be made in go-to-market, manufacturing capacity, like where are investments that need to be made in the business in order to better capture the demand drivers that you're seeing?

So from an operating expense perspective, we've been pretty -- during these phases, we've been very focused and have built in a lot of those process steps. We discussed our capacity at 6,000 racks per month, 3,000 liquid cooled, 3,000 air cooled. But what we haven't disclosed necessarily as the new square footage that we've been adding in droves in the new buildings that are coming on stream and a couple of clean room facilities, the manufacturing capabilities that we have that if you think forward, what we're going to do with those. And we'll update the market when they're more solidified, but we're expanding pretty aggressively under the cover.

So I think Charles has always been a foot forward on what he sees, what we need to do to get there. Again, we've been expanding our go-to-market sales and focusing those. We had some new leadership changes there that were contemplated for a while, and they're working very quite well. And so I think we're staying pace with what the market is. And 75% growth at these numbers is pretty significant on a year-over-year basis. And -- but we're -- there's more to be done, and we're working on trying to get to that place is built into the model.

We've made it 22 minutes and I haven't asked about CPU servers yet. Can you talk about how this is -- it's certainly always been in the core competency of Super Micro, but a renewed focus by the market on how neoclouds and enterprises are thinking about the role of general compute? How did that factor into results in this quarter and then the outlook going forward? How does that mix ultimately impacts the margin profile of Super Micro as well?

So the mix factor was beneficial for us in the prior quarter. I think everyone knows that. The enterprise customers and the CPU-based systems are important key underpinning of what we have done. And I think I mentioned earlier with Intel, I used to use the word back in the day, putting more -- 2 processors on a board to 4 processors on a board like, wow, that was really cutting edge at the time, lowering the power draw was cutting edge, making blades with 20% lower power draw was cutting edge. So we've cut a lot of teeth in that arena and have a lot of enterprise customers and a lot of great partnerships on the OEM side that are CPU-based.

As we move forward, we see this really solid opportunity, one, to continue with that because there's an aged fleet of general compute or enterprise servers. And we've said this before in the past that, that fleet will need to be upgraded, condensed, solidified, whatever you want to call it, to make room for new capacity. So if you listen to some of our partners when they talk about AI CPUs, they'll be running the agents, they're going to be doing -- going into the models. And there's model verticalization, there's an expansion of applications in the space that just kind of create more of an opportunity for agents. So the agentic element of AI is there. And some are using traditional CPUs, and we see the opportunity for many to use Arm-based CPUs.

So that opportunity set at the enterprise for a solution next to the core enterprise is significant. So we're pretty excited about it, and we have all kinds of products on the come in this zone, and we'll wrap around DCBBS, and it will be an enhancer in the enterprises need to help. They need the solution. They're not going to build it themselves. And even our larger neocloud customers will probably verticalize within their business. There's not just a model to have all kinds of different services, and we'll look to supply them. So it's a really, really big opportunity. We're pretty excited about it.

A big part of enterprise, the difference relative to NeoCloud, is the need for help and support in both the integration, the deployment, the ongoing maintenance of these systems. How should we think about the investment that Super Micro is making to be more front-footed in that? Some of your legacy peers have very established services practices, but not necessarily the same model for Super Micro?

So we -- this will be kind of interesting because as we move forward, like as could the services model change, obviously, we are expanding go-to-market and services. But if you're on the agentic side, what will the service model look like? Will there be self-healing? Will it be the other elements that we could do to augment that? So sure, we will have service personnel in the field. And if we need to scale up in particular areas, we will do that.

So we're conscious of expanding service -- the service model as well as maybe some innovative solutions from a service perspective for some of these systems. So there's a lot to be done there, and there's a lot of systems. And again, if we are 200, 300 in size, there'll be clear evidence of us supporting those customers.

And then one last one, kind of touching on the OpEx side. In the expanding customer set, there's likely going to be -- need to be a change in the go-to-market. You talked about some leadership changes on that side. But thinking about Super Micro's legacy engagements were driven by the strength of your reputation and the products that you put forward. But as you service more customers, you may need to engage with the channel, go through some other kind of vendors or partners, how are you thinking about that over time as you reach more into that $2 trillion to $4 trillion TAM?

So I think the interesting thing is if you look at the IDC numbers, our share gain, our position -- I think we're #2. We clearly have sights on #1. So I think it's embedded in the organization and the scale and the growth rate that we've had, it just may not be as obvious for some reason because the customers that we generally have are very technology focused, they're using technology to lever their business, and there's a lot more of them that are doing that and by nature of serving like some really sophisticated customer base with some really interesting product and high quality and amazing reliability is driving more customers to us and which is forcing the expansion of the organization to serve even more. So the success of our products are leading the way.

And I think being product focused first is very, very helpful to gain more customers. So we're expanding a pretty controlled way. Can we expand faster if we spend more money? We'll see. But that's -- we're doing a lot, and I think that's -- I think it's a positive for the organization.

Maybe I'll ask one more, and then I'll see if there's any in the room. In terms of the pace of expansion, something that to be mindful of is needing to go back to the capital markets to raise financing. Can you talk about kind of the balance there and thinking about certain levers like working capital intensity, some of the factors that are in the broader equation when determining how aggressively to go after some of these opportunities?

So I think that the interesting part of that is that -- the capital intensity has been high. We've seen a pretty nice diversification of the customer base, more enterprises. There's more credit in the end markets. And there's -- we've done a pretty good job as we move forward with respect to terms with customers and timing of delivery to reduce the intensity on the working capital side.

So we're making conscious efforts to improve that as we move forward so that we can become self-funded downstream. And get back to a point where we can return capital to shareholders. It's probably going to be a little while because the growth right now is pretty extraordinary. So there's a lot to juggle with customers and capital conversions and innovation. It's -- but I think we're doing a really effective job at this point in time. And I think we're in good shape with -- for fiscal '27.

Great. Are there any questions in the room?

Do we have a mic runner?

Just a quick question. To what extent are you starting to sell to, say, sovereigns as well as enterprises that want on-prem [indiscernible] AI systems? Is it minimal? Or is it growing?

It's great to highlight that again. So enterprises are coming on stream. We have several -- more than several sovereign deployments as we speak, globally. So they're clearly spending. I think the early motion was enterprise spending was into the neocloud. So enterprise spending was -- sovereign spending was into the neocloud. So we're capturing it early on, but we're seeing clear evidence of them moving forward and putting factories on the floor and expanding there.

So that opportunity set looks phenomenal. I think someone had asked like how big could sovereigns be? But if you go $2 trillion to $4 trillion and you kind of do the math, I mean, it could be a pretty big the 10%, 25% of the total market, and they're fully funded. So they're wonderful in that respect. And enterprises, we used to engaging with and so the newer customers that had swamped the market a year or 2 ago are now more mature. So I think there's a maturation and expansion of this market. It's still early days that look really good from our ability to help push forward.

Any other questions from the audience? Another one for you. You talked about all the ways in which you are selling AI solutions to neocloud, sovereigns, to enterprises. But Super Micro is an enterprise itself. How are you using applications of AI internally in a way that helps you inform your customer behavior and your customer relationships? And anything to talk about, especially as you're making some of these OpEx investments to offset some of those expenses?

I guess that's a really interesting question. I know there's broad-based use internally for various elements with -- from a standpoint of a rollout of a specific program on the engineering side. TBD, I don't know what they're doing. I'm sure they're using it in some form or fashion. But I know that we're very focused on the factory side from an automation perspective to improve several of the processes there, whether -- and those should be helpful, but I just don't have the exact -- what -- we have a killer app here. But we're definitely using it.

In our last couple of minutes here, just in closing, what are some aspects of the Super Micro strategy that you want to highlight that we've talked to or we didn't maybe get to discuss today that you think are important to focus on for investors in the next, we'll call it, 3 to 5 year time?

I think the #1 thing to think about is the innovation and the ability to bring any of the platforms to market for customers in a total solution package and that the next generation of AI infrastructure has a different kind of cast to it. We're not impeded by any legacy technology that we have to continue to support on an ongoing basis for let's say, for enterprises. So it's all net new for us. That gives us a lot of degrees of freedom to innovate and bring other elements to customers that they may need. So we've been able to flex pretty quickly on understanding what the market does need.

And again, the pace of change has been so phenomenal that the opportunity set for us to continue innovating is there. And I think that keeps the customer conversation very, very strong. I mean, it's well beyond the days where you're just buying something off the shelf and run it for and have someone service it and that's it. But so this is well beyond that. So we're very focused on getting that -- delivering that to the end customer. So I think that's a pretty misunderstood element of what we're doing. And it's important. It's a really important factor.

Great. Any other final thoughts for us?

Well, I think we covered a lot.

Okay. Thank you, everyone, very much.

All right.

All right. Welcome, everyone. Day 1 of Citi's Technology Conference. My name is Asiya Merchant. Afternoon here of day 1. Glad to see everybody. I head -- I lead the technology hardware and tech supply chain here at Citi Research. Really happy to have Super Micro's management here with us. Mike Staiger here with me, and we have other folks from Super Micro as well in the audience. This presentation here is fireside. So I do have a bunch of questions. I'm going to allow for a few minutes for investors to ask questions as well. And please do raise your hand so we can bring the mic to you.

All right, Mike. Pretty good. How's Super Micro?

Super Micro is doing great.

All right. Well, you guys had a very, very strong fiscal '26 growth rate, right? I mean you're talking about -- I think you talked about 78% that you reported, you have Q1 revenue that's very, very strong coming in. Talk to me about just your guidance, how are you thinking about other constraints that are kind of factoring into your guidance here? And just how are you thinking about the picture that you're sharing for Q1 relative to some of the other constraints that are out there?

Well, interesting, it's good to see you again. I think it was like a couple of years ago, we were on stage, and we had just done a $14.9 billion a year. And now we're talking about doing that at the midpoint of $15 billion quarter.

So how things have changed or progressed over time. So anyway, obviously, demand has been strong in the backdrop, and we've reflected that in our guidance. And we talk about customer diversification and expansion of opportunity. There's an expansion of product platforms across the board. So from our perspective, we're trying to fulfill that demand. And part of the cadence on the order book is having a pretty good idea of where the customers are going to be at what time, what they need, where they need it. And I think that's pretty helpful from the standpoint of backstopping the order book and the guidance that we have on a go-forward basis.

And there's a lot of discussion around constraints, right? I mean everybody is reading the papers. Everybody knows there's constraints, whether it's memory, it's CPU, it's power, how is that kind of -- why do you feel like this demand is durable, and it's not just they're coming to Super Micro, they're coming maybe to your peers and saying, give us this, and there's a little bit of double ordering perhaps because everybody is worried that they're not going to get it.

Yes. I think the durability -- so one, the guidance across the board -- the outlook across the board for the industry has been robust. There's been outsized performance from a lot of players. And the backdrop of this has been the applications. And you see application development is off the charts for new AI workloads. We're application optimized.

You see that the solution sets that are being offered to customers from our partners, whether it's NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Arm and others. There's multiple different solution sets that they're targeting different verticals.

So this expansion of opportunity set at the end user base is significant. Last week, you saw VMware enter the fray on the VCF for the AI factory stack. You saw our announcement and engagement with Cisco. So those are enterprise-focused elements where I think the market a year ago was, is the enterprise going to adopt AI?

And there's clear proof points that there's an expansion going across the board. When you look at our -- again, our diversification across the customer base is really supportive of this. And the solution element is where we're really focused on. We mentioned that to you in the past, I mean, months or quarters ago that DCBBS strategy will help the solution to the customer, and we're focused on delivering an application optimized AI solution or a factory, so to speak, and there will be a mixture of components that are in there, and we're going to mix those up and sort of supportive of margins and the application stack is expanding. So we're pretty excited, and we're racing ahead to build what customers need.

Okay. I think customer diversification has always been one that focus -- that's always been our focus for Super Micro, right? I mean you started off with these large systems. And by virtue of selling these large systems, they were typically one or two customers that were key drivers of demand. But now you have more than that. I think you have more than 9 customers that are generating $1 billion in revenue. So the diversification story has played out well for you. And so any one quarter, that could be maybe more customer concentration. How are you thinking about customer concentration today? I mean is this a path that is still sort of for you guys to still to diversify even more? Or are you thinking about some big customers that are going to be primarily driving a lot of that demand?

So we were pretty clear about the fact that we were focused on expanding our footprint with respect to the enterprise. Sure, there was a few large customers in the past and still will be, as we move forward, as the initial build-out was occurring. You saw a few large customers where everyone wanted to participate in -- with those customers.

So there was a little bit of pricing pressure, et cetera, if you want to call it that. But those customers are expanding their use cases and their needs and expanding upon what services they can offer, like AICP systems are going to be offered by some of the larger customers, an enhancement of what they're doing at the large customer site. But under the belly of all this, again, the enterprise customers, neoclouds and even the sovereigns are looking to stand up infrastructure to take advantage of the applications and we're there to support them.

And we have the -- basically almost any diversification and breadth of platform for them. And so this will be very helpful from a standpoint of broadening out that customer base. We're already seeing it, so that's great. But we'll always have -- and we always have had some larger customers in the mix. And the argument has been we're reliant on one large customer or two large customers and they'll be displaced by someone else. And we've had a very nice history of gradually expanding with our customers and expanding with our capabilities for them and serving them.

So customer focus is a huge thing for us and we do -- we're doing -- we're offering them a whole host of different solutions to accommodate their needs most effectively, well.

And then just a little bit on lumpiness, right? I mean you could see that in the last quarter where the revenues came in a little bit towards the low end of the guide. There's always lumpiness in this segment, right? There's always power constraints or something. So how are you guys managing that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your visibility, how you think about lumpiness, how it flows through like on your working capital side as well?

Yes. So from a lumpiness perspective, if you want to call it that, we've had some customer -- there's been some challenges at the customer sites or supplier sites or whatever it may be. And those have always -- we've always captured those revenues downstream. It just might not be in the same time frame as what we had anticipated due to things beyond our control.

So one of the good things about this situation is as we move forward and diversification occurs, there's a better visibility of what, where and how. Again, and the other thing is that the industry has matured to a certain extent, where there's more folks who understand the dynamics of standing up new services or a new data center and have been preparing for quite some time.

So we're kind of meeting that in a better fashion where we anticipate or the customers anticipating their needs are met. And this also kind of backs into the DCBBS strategy because we saw early on customers could order a large amount of racks, and they might not have all the componentry that they need to stand those racks up and get their systems working.

So if they have made a significant investment, let's say, $0.5 billion or $1 billion, and they're sitting there with idle systems because they can't integrate it. They can't get a networking stack to work. They can't get it integrated with their storage stack. The power cooling is not in the right area. But we're productizing those things so that we can drop in factories, essentially AI factories for the customers that when they make the investment, it hits the floor, they turn it on as prevalidated, as this goes to the L12-validation services.

They're paying for the use of the systems. They're not worried about trying to stand these systems up. And the hyperscalers can do that because they have all the engineering support in the world. But enterprises and many neoclouds do not have this capability, sovereigns don't have those capabilities. But we're doing it for them, and we're pricing for value for those customers. When they get these systems, the more important part is the reliability of those systems is significant.

So the uptime that's available to that customer to run their workload, they have more of the available system. So that saves them significant amount of dollars. I do believe one of -- there are some figures out there like 8 racks of NVL72 being down for 30 days or not being available for 30 days is $3 million. So you can see customers that have 100 or some customers who might have 1,000, that's -- or more. That's a huge amount of dollars for one month idle kind of situation, right?

So customers are now realizing that where they might not have realized it before and the race to a low price was the element, not the race to have a system that works as services are available as more of a thrust delivering the value is what we've been doing, and we've articulated that even a year ago with the DCBBS strategy where people are trying to pick apart what does that mean for margins for you, but what it means for the customers where we're going, we're enabling the customer get some work gets their systems up, working faster.

And it's better for our partners because everything is more synchronous and that is -- lowers the capital burden too as well because the timing of putting all this together delivery payment, contractual terms are far more favorable for us.

Okay. And then just within that mix, you have enterprise, you have sovereigns, your neoclouds. Any further incremental like breakdown, you could say like what percentage of the revenue or at least of the forecasted revenue you're thinking those three buckets?

We haven't given that kind of level of detail because the irony here is we're not even talking about hyperscalers, but hyperscalers are putting workloads into our customer base. That customer base is expanding, and you're seeing some newer contracts that have come up, you're like, holy cow, where is -- I think a year ago, so where is the revenue going to come from?

And there -- we're seeing it -- so you have improved credit quality across the board and enterprise is participating. And so I think the rising tide, so to speak, is lifting all boats. And you see enterprise activities accelerating. Again, we talked about or I discussed some very large enterprise partners, Cisco or VMware. Like, that cadence of adoption is we're in early stages, but it's spreading out. And it's proof points in our order book and probably others in the industry.

Okay. And then you talk a lot about DCBBS. I know that's a topic that has served you well, and we just talked about it in terms of being able to speak to market the reliability of these systems. Any color you can provide? What percentage of your revenues is it? And what opportunities lie ahead? And would it be across -- like are you seeing adoption at an equal pace between the neoclouds, the sovereigns, the enterprises -- or is 1 of them further along?

Yes. I don't know if I can -- I would assume neoclouds is probably further along, but the real thrust of this is not just that we're supplying all the componentry that they can do, but the integration of the system so that they can actually use the system without any -- with an increased enhanced reliability is paramount, right?

So all the different parts, we need to integrate them to actually make them work, firmware, et cetera, software and our software stack that sits on top of it, where ultimately that software stack will be able to run across different AI factories and integrate those as well. So we're trying to really empower the customer to leverage the infrastructure that we're providing them.

Again, this is solution value. And so it's something that we think that we're well ahead of our peers in providing and we'll continue to forge ahead with new capabilities as those capabilities become available or known to the market.

Okay. All right. Let me just ask the audience if there's any questions, please do raise your hand. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about gross margins. You guys had like stellar margins in Q4. You talked a little bit about favorable mix here. I think then you guided for a little bit of margin volatility in 1Q. Aside from the quarterly variance, like how should we think about the overall margins of this -- of the business? Like where do you think the target could be as we're growing your revenues, yes?

We tend to -- on the gross margin side, we're giving one quarter at a time because of the variability in what we're actually doing. But the longer-term goal from an internal perspective is to double-digit and move that bar higher over time. I think there were some older targets that were floating around that were 14, 17. We just showed that we could do a 17 and change quarter. There was some favorable things in that mix. And as we move forward, it's hard to solution the customer and provide more value to them so that we can capture a better margin number.

So the long-term goal is clearly higher. We called that a while back where profitability was important, and we've been working on the profitability element. And so I think as we encapsulate more value and more componentry in the systems, I think the market looks at AI systems as like a low margin build and they're going to pin a lot of our success to that.

But what we're doing for those customers, there's multiple different variations and customers are kind of aligning them to the application. And so there's oftentimes where we might be the only vendor supplying that. And if we put some more componentry and whether it's power cooling into the mix, that gives us a better value to the customer, and we're getting paid for that whether that's 10%, 12% or whatever the number is, we're getting paid for that because we're bringing the value to the customer, and we're saving a significant amount of dollars in the back end of having the system available and having a more reliable system.

So we're moving into -- more into that model. We've called that out prior, and now we're actually delivering that. And so we're on a pretty good path here.

And then what about on the -- as you're trying to scale these DCBBS, there is a lot of services, like you said, attached with it to make sure that these systems are reliable and enterprise or wherever the end customers can turn it on, it works, what about on the OpEx side of things? As these are scaling and you're growing them as a mix of your business, do you also have to invest as much in OpEx on the service side?

So we're -- currently, we're investing in go-to-market and services. We recognize the fact that we have much to do to expand those capabilities because the customers are demanding it, and we want to support and service our gear. And of course, it's a little bit -- it's enhancements to the business model.

The L12 element of validated services is super important. And so we want to support that as well. It's built into the guide in the model, and we've been very efficient from an operating expense perspective. So we're not going to break any eggs in this situation. So could we spend a little bit more if we need to? Probably wouldn't -- you probably wouldn't see that in the mix, but we're investing in that. We've been investing in capacity. We've invested in a lot of different areas and building the business as quickly as possible. So it's a real-time run-time environment, large start-up, large public start-up.

Similarly, like people just -- I mean, I know you just talked about it, the go-to-market, but the enterprise business in the channel, like it's pretty diverse, especially as you think about the international as well. You have to support these customers. Just help us understand, like given the model that you guys have typically run where OpEx is still a very, very small percentage of your revenues. Like how are you thinking about penetrating this enterprise base

and what additional investments that you talked about, are you doing that's going to support the go-to-market and the sales and operational side of...

I think it's important to understand that the basis of the organization is enterprise-focused and always has been. And what we're bringing to the enterprise is something unique and different, at least we feel, and that is AI enablement, and the infrastructure looks a little bit different than the traditional what you've been covering, the COTS, server networking, commodity off-the-shelf server.

And so from that perspective, we're focused on delivering these solutions. So again, we have multiple different partners, multiple different platforms within those partners that customers are now understanding that they need. So we are front face with the enterprise. It just happens to be the enterprise -- that segment of the market that we're engaged with are ones that are very technology foot forward. And the proof points are -- have been our delivery to them some of the large names that you know, the proof points are to some of the neoclouds that are serving the enterprise.

It's arguable that neocloud is our enterprise businesses. We have some really strong relationships on the OEM front where our systems are literally installed everywhere. And so our motion on enterprise is to expand it more to serve more of the customers because we see the need for AI applications expanding and that we can take meaningful share, and we were going to support those customers on the services side. And if there's markets that were not necessarily present, we'll partner, and we're 100% committed to it, and that's been the engine of growth over the past let's just say, 10 years for the organization.

So putting more performance, more power and a smaller envelope, all the things that a customer needs, and we've argued that enterprises have aging equipment. And if they want to put AI factories in, there's a likelihood of a significant refresh of the existing CPU-type business, consolidate there, more density, more power and then have some room for or an AI system or an AI factory to be installed next to it. So that looks to be the direction of the market, and we're going to supply that. We already are supplying that.

Okay. And then just a little bit about liquid cooling. I know that was something that would get a lot of attention. It still does. As you're -- as that offering expands just from high-end GPU deployments, maybe to CPU deployments. How should we think about liquid cooling and how Super Micro is differentiated in that space? And what it could do to your overall product margins as well?

So on that front, we're providing customers the liquid cooling, the power if and where they need liquid-cooling GPU systems, liquid-cooling CPU systems. And so our goal is to optimize the liquid cooling element to get the best thermal dynamics for the customer, which we have always led in that category. And so I think that we're going to continue to push forward. I mean, there's lot of different ways to do liquid cooling, including immersion, and we've done that in the past, and there's a call for that in some particular cases in the future.

So the power envelope and doing our power supplies and our banks, et cetera, we're 100% aligned to optimize those for the system for the factory, so to speak, that we're going to deliver to the customers. So it's part of the dynamic. It's part of the offering, and we'll just continue to improve upon it as we move forward.

Any updated adoption here?

I don't think we do necessarily outside of uptake of the systems that are naturally known to be liquid cooled. The shipments of -- those shipments are...

Okay. For the large labs, yes.

And then there's customers that are retrofitting air cooled systems with some cooling element to get more performance out of them to cool them to get more power efficient. So we're able to supply that in many cases.

Inventory. I know there's a lot of changes that are constantly happening on the architecture side and GPU transition. So your inventory did bump up quite a bit. I think you talked about inventory days roughly around 190. So how are you managing this risk? I mean, given that customers are changing architectures are changing, customers are adopting, deciding what works, what doesn't work for them. And then relative to the inventory that you have, like how are you managing that risk of making sure that there isn't any obsolescence risk there?

Yes. There's always been a fear of obsolescence risk, but I don't -- I think it's overstated. We've been able to manage that quite effectively. We have had some -- a few minor inventory charges in the past then a reversal recently. Customers are looking to use whatever they can get their hands on. So there's been an element of every tier within the market is finding homes for systems and the durability of these systems is pretty extensive.

The $12.9 billion in inventory, I think you can kind of kind of match that up to the forward need of the company or the guide. So we've been pretty good at managing that quite effectively to minimize risk. So I think there's been no real change there.

Okay. Free cash flow generation, I know that takes up quite a bit of investor interest, especially given you guys are talking about pretty significant demand growth here. You've raised money for that. Just walk us through like as you're growing your revenues here and meeting a pretty sizable order outlook that you've shared -- how should we think about operating cash flow and working capital intensity as those orders get converted to revenue?

So with the backdrop in the order book, $60 billion and the diversification of the customer base and the improvement from a standpoint of delivering value to the customer. We have an idea of when, where, how things are needed. The contracts that we're striking with customers, and imagine that the enterprise-grade customers have -- there's less pressure from -- there was a lot of start-up activity a year or 2 ago that had a little bit more lean towards terms that were that may not have been favorable for us.

And we put a few things through the system. There's a couple of large orders that came through the system. And the focus now is the diversification will move that out. There's improved contract terms. There's customers that are enterprise grade that will pay up front half upfront and then half on delivery. So those things will be significant improvements from a cash conversion cycle as we move forward.

So the goal is to be self-funded, downstream, but we've been dealing with this excess of growth, and so we have had capital markets in the past, but the focus is smoothing that out. We have new sales leadership that's focused on value and matching terms and the deliveries. And so there's less pressure on the capital. It's a pretty big goal for the year.

Okay. And then the growth outlook that you've shared about $65 billion to $70 billion at that level, you feel like internally funded?

Yes, 65. Yes. And so we feel pretty comfortable with what we see at this point in time and really called that out.

Okay. All right. You've had some investigations. It seems like the Board has been -- the investigation has cleared the management. There were some bad actors there. What specific if you think about some solutions that you're putting in some operational stuff that you guys are putting in into this thing into the organization, what are you guys doing so that investors can feel comfortable that there wouldn't be any of this stuff going to China, where it shouldn't be going? Like maybe if you can help investors understand what you guys have done.

Well, one, we were pretty committed to not having that happen. And two, again, as you mentioned, the Board cleared there was no involvement at the company level. We have beefed up significantly, legal and export control staffing, where that wasn't really a big need a while back, and it's become -- as we become more global, it's been to become a significant need. So we've had some significant adds in that area.

And so we have programs in place and have a Chief Compliance Officer that we've appointed a legal staff that we've added and enhanced. So from that perspective, we feel pretty good that we will have no problems as we move forward in the future.

Okay. Any -- yes, have you seen any change from the chip suppliers or other component providers as a result of all these investigations? I mean I know now they've come to an end, but...

Well, we're pretty we're more than committed to not having those issues and working with our partners to make sure that, that's not an issue for anyone. It's been somewhat of an industry problem that everyone's trying to make sure that, that's not that's right.

Okay. I'm going to ask a little bit about just the TAM, the TAM growth is pretty significant as we're sitting here, on Citi side, we did raise our own AI CapEx numbers just last week. We've heard AMD so, we've raised our CPU numbers. TAM growth pretty significantly. Just help us understand how you're thinking about Super Micro's market share and just even the TAM growth and then Super Micro's market share in that TAM.

If you take the $2 trillion to $4 trillion that some of our partners are tossing out there as a total market number. And if we currently have 10% market share now, and we were able to capture in that time frame, 10% of the market, that's the $200 billion revenue number for us. I would argue that the solution element that we're bringing to the table and the differentiation kind of significantly improves the opportunity set for us in that TAM because we're 100% aligned to bringing the technology to the customers that is optimized for those particular workloads.

So as we move forward, it should be better. And so we're 100% attuned to that. So I think it's good news for us for the most part.

Okay. And then what about funding that kind of growth, right? I mean, as you grow from...

We'll worry about with that when we cross that bridge. But I think one of the points about like how can we get to greater than 10%. So if 10% of the customers are performance-oriented. And 10% of the customers are like value oriented. That's 20% of the market. So we kind of have a pretty good -- 10% of the customers really chew through systems pretty fast and need to replace them with the next greatest thing.

And then there's a value-oriented customer that's like looking for the most capacity per dollar, so to speak. So that's 20% of the market. So when we talk about TAM and like the growth rate, what percent addressable we can get to that maps out to a possibility of getting 20%. And if you put in the solution element that puts us beyond that kind of number. So the upside from our perspective on the revenue front is significant.

Again, the customer base will be coming to us will be enterprise grade more so. And the cash conversion cycle on our enterprise customers is it's always been good for us. So we'll be able to generate cash forward and self-fund that.

Okay. I think one of the terms you used was backlog, like we're making sure we're putting some backlog terms to make sure that the cash conversion cycle is satisfactory. And again, sort of meets the need of funding the growth rate here. Just what does that mean? Like specifically, like what specific improvements are you putting in the backlog there?

Specific in our...

Yes, backlog terms, yes.

I don't think we've disclosed any of those things. So I'm not at liberty to say, but I think when we contract with our customers, we're very clear about terms when they need it, what they need, what the solution looks like. And so I think having that greater integration with the customer as opposed to a customer coming to us to say, I need a server, which was 2015, I need a couple of servers. I think get a couple of boxes, a couple of pizza boxes, is a different conversation. It's a deeper one. And so that kind of solidifies the order book and what you would characterize as backlog of what we need to deliver to the customer and what we would need to fund that from an OpEx perspective. So I think it's in pretty good shape.

Okay. We have a couple more minutes here. I just want to see if somebody in the audience has any questions. Oh, great. All right.

I mean what I can say is that we're engaged and we are shipping those products. So it's early days.

Great. Maybe just one more. Just as you think about these deployments, these massive deployments, the TAM that you're talking about, has anything changed when it comes to when you want -- when your customers want these Super Micro servers and solutions rather, to be deployed, is it now closer? Has anything changed there, whether it's not just visibility but time to -- from the time they send you an order to the time they want delivery?

I don't think any material change. I think everyone knows kind of what the parameters are for timing cases. Obviously, there's an engagement with the partners in the stack to understand how it's able when we can do it and how we can do it. There's a lot of synchronization. So that goes back to your double ordering thing, like I do not think that we're -- this quantum of size is it's not easy to double order anything.

There's been an extension like people giving you orders out like previously, I don't know if it was 6 months out, 8, 9 months out. Now it's like extended beyond that. So that order book that you have is actually beyond a year?

I think the customer engagement would be we expect to do something, but whether it's an order or not is a different thing. So the order number much more firmer commitment of like when it will be as opposed to they're ordering it for a certain period of time. But we know that there's intentions beyond what's on our order book. We expect our order book to grow.

NVIDIA is like 80% of your business, perhaps more, AMD is very small. Do you think that will remain the same going forward?

It's -- I hate to say it's customer choice. And those numbers can move around depending on orders at any given time. But I think it's important to understand that the solution that NVIDIA is delivering, there's many different variations and we have all those for customers, and customers are ordering those, too, as well. So great partner, and we look forward to growing with them. We look forward to growing with our other partners, AMD and Intel and ARM.

And the demand for the solutions you could see that the application developments off the charts for AI, you might not see the use cases yet in the enterprise, but if those applications continue to expand, it will need underlying systems and optimized systems. And so everyone's -- there's so many different solutions now, and we're able to deliver all of those. So the key takeaway we're positioned to be able to deliver AI infrastructure of any nature of any kind to the customer base and in a total package in a total factory and continue to serve a pretty large market.

Maybe what are investors missing about this Super Micro story?

Well, I think the last point I made is like, look, there's significant opportunity for us to be the solution provider as we go forward for AI. It's a next-generation kind of architecture and we're well ahead of our competitors in innovation and delivering these solutions. So I think that's a pretty key point.

Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Yes. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jen, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Super Micro Computer, Inc. Q4 FY '26 Business Update Call.

With us today are Charles Liang, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer; David Weigand, CFO; and Michael Staiger, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Michael Staiger. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, and thank you for attending Super Micro's call to discuss financial results for the Fourth Quarter of Fiscal 2026, which ended June 30, 2026. With me today, as you know, are Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Weigand, Chief Financial Officer.

By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website. As a reminder, during today's call, the company will refer to a presentation that is available to participants in the Investor Relations section of the company's website under the Events Presentations tab. We've also published management's scripted commentary on our website. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and the full fiscal year '27.

These statements and other comments are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. You can learn more about these risks and uncertainties in the press release we issued earlier today, our most recent 10-K filing for fiscal '25 and other SEC filings. All these documents are available on the IR page of Super Micro's website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Most of today's presentation will refer to non-GAAP financial results and business outlook. For an explanation of our non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the accompanying presentation or to our press release published earlier today. The non-GAAP measures are presented as we believe that they provide investors with the means of evaluating and understanding how the company's management evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. In addition, a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is contained in today's press release and in the supplemental information attached to today's presentation. At the end of today's prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session for sell-side analysts. Our fiscal '27 -- '26, excuse me, quiet period begins at the close of business on Friday, September 11, 2026.

I will now turn the call over to Charles.

Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining today's call. Fiscal year 2026 was a historic milestone for Super Micro, as we nearly doubled our revenue year-over-year, growing from $22 billion last year to $39 billion fiscal year '26. The world is being transformed by AI and Super Micro is transforming as well from a U.S.-based server manufacturer into a leading AI IT decenter total solution company.

We design and manufacture our total Data Center Building Block Solutions, DCBBS in the U.S. with main facilities in USA, Taiwan, Malaysia and Netherlands. The demand for our AI IP solutions is even stronger than ever before as we are transforming into a total DCBBS company, a one-stop shop company for customers who want to build their data center or AI factory quicker and better.

In our pre-announcement, we disclosed over $60 billion in new orders, driving our order book and backlog to a new record levels as we enter fiscal year 2027. While Q4 revenue came in at $11.1 billion due to some short-term customer delay in power, shortage, cooling and networking. We know this is purely a timing story. The good news is that now our customer can easily leverage our unique DCBBS total solution advantage and upcoming new technology and product lines to accelerate their time to deployment, we call [ TTT ] and Time-to-Online become TTO, ensuring a strong future growth and long-term value for Super Micro for many years to come.

Most importantly, our focus on auditability and yielding clear results. For the first quarter, I'm happy to report non-GAAP gross margin of 17.6% and [ $1.76 ] in non-GAAP diluted earnings per share. This margin expansion mainly came from our strategy focused on balancing customer mix and product mix, while having new having a view a onetime positive contribution for the quarter. Since early 2026, we had dedicated departments and resource to focus on growing enterprise customer base and have expanded our enterprise CPU-based servers, storage and IoT product lines. Our quickly growing [ infancy ] and agent AI-centric product also achieving healthy profit margins for the company going forward.

Another key produce margin expansion is our DCBBS, which delivers total solution value by seamlessly integrated GU and CPU server enterprise storage, directly liquid cooling solutions, CDU, [ Chiodo ], water tower, high-speed data suite and networking data center management [indiscernible] and full lifestyle services. This turnkey ecosystem enables customers to build and scale a data center in quarters rather than is dramatically reducing TCO and accelerating time to online and time to revenue for customers. We are further elevating this value proposition with our proactive service model where our data center management software and feed teams will automatically alert and be ready immediately to fix or maintain [ nefarious ] unit for the main reduction of computing power as a customer data center.

As the new software with powerful management features and automatic service attached to our hardware bills. They depend that deepen customer trust and drive long-term value. Our DCBBS is getting very powerful and so contribute significant net income to our business. By early next quarter, more of those software features and service product will be online.

On the operations side, we are complementing this high-value strategy by giving higher manufacturing yields through factory automation, design optimization and our highly versatile building broker architecture. At the same time, we remain very focused on logistics and inventory management, significantly introducing inventory reserve and expedite charge. Together, these operational discipline will have moderate quarter-to-quarter margin fluctuation driven by uneven customer and product mix, supporting our goal of consistent growing gross margins.

Turning to our key product road map. Our system building product allow us to quickly optimize every major silicon platform. Through our long-term NVIDIA partnership, we are shipping volume SKU across the GB300 NVL72, [indiscernible] and [ RTS6000 ] produc tlines tactic, while preparing first-to-market Vera Rubin we are [ MVN72 ], [ Lubin-HGX ] and [ Vera C1 ] and other high-density Vera systems. With [ AMD ], we launched a complete new Helios product line and [ MI450 ] total solution alongside strong [ EPIC CPU MI350 ] and [ MI355 ] ages momentum.

Working with [ IMP ], we brought parcel [indiscernible] system to market and shipping GMVs platform in volume. We also dedicated on developing product for the strong demand of AGI process based [ Conan Finnis ], architecture outlet for high-performance per inventing work loans, demonstrating our silicon partners deep confidence in our engineering excellence.

To support a massive demand, we continue to expand our physical footprint. In Silicon Valley, we invested alone our new 32-acre DCBBS campus featuring advanced optical photonics networking debt and data center scale manufacturing, which police our USA footprint to nearly 4 million square feet. Globally, our facilities in Taiwan, Malaysia and Netherlands, are also ramping strongly to meet the demand, putting our total manufacturing capacity on track to exceed 6,000 reps per month including more than 3,000 direct [indiscernible] including [indiscernible] per month, especially most of our [ DC ] production line supported most dense dates [ 250K ] platforms.

Before I close, a quick update on our capital strategy. following our $5.6 billion financing in June, our balance sheet further support our components supply and business needs. Thank you to our strong cash position and more favorable customer and product mix. We currently have not planned to utilize our ATM program, which we initiated a few months ago. At the same time, we remain focused on building financial efficiency. We did all of these operational and about advancement, I want to emphasize that our growth momentum is accelerating where it made most by expanding hundreds of new enterprise customers and other come and leading the transition into agentic and specialized AI workflow. Super Micro has become fundamental architect of today's AI backbone.

Our DCBBS total solution supermini CPU and GPU compute, storage, energy and [ 1.50 ] high-speed switch upcoming optical networking and our management software suite including [ SCF Sipilou ] composer, [indiscernible] center manager and SON Super Micro trader manager delivers the complete one-stop shop experience that modern enterprise, new cloud and any other data center customer needs.

Looking to fiscal year 2027, our momentum gives us strong confidence to target our revenue in the range of $65 billion to $72 billion as we are in the process of historic infrastructure [indiscernible]. We are balancing top line expansion with bottom line profitability by focusing on growing enterprise customer base, customer mix, DCBBS solutions and operational discipline. We are shipping the future of AI technology while delivering 2 technology value to our customers. I'm very confident that fiscal year 2027 will be our strong and faster growth year again.

Thank you, and I will now turn the call to David.

Thank you, Charles. We are pleased to report record fiscal year '26 revenue of $39.1 billion, up 78% over fiscal year '25 [ ROCs ] and $22 billion in record non-GAAP fully diluted EPS of $3.63, up 76% over fiscal year '25 EPS of $2.06.

Our fiscal year '26 ending backlog was at a record level with over $60 billion in new orders received during Q4 of fiscal year '26, which we expect to fulfill over the coming quarters. Non-GAAP gross margins of fiscal year -- for fiscal year '26 were 10.9% versus 11.2% in fiscal year '25. Our fiscal year '26 non-GAAP operating margins expanded to 8.1% from 7.1% in fiscal year '25. Our customer base is diversifying and we had 9 customers in fiscal year '26 with revenues greater than $1 billion each versus [ Forest's ] customers in fiscal year '25.

Turning to fiscal Q4 fiscal year '26 results. We achieved revenue of $11.1 billion, up 93% year-over-year and up 9% quarter-over-quarter. Revenue was near the low end of our guidance range of $11 billion to $12.5 billion due to delays in customer readiness, and we anticipate this revenue to be recognized in subsequent quarters. These AI solutions, our AI solutions contributed approximately 60% of total revenue in Q4 versus over 80% in Q3 and due to the timing of some large AI project ramps. Based on our backlog, we believe greater than 80% of revenues will be AI-related solutions going forward.

During Q4, enterprise and channel revenue was $5.6 billion, representing 50% of total revenue compared with 28% in the prior quarter. Revenue in this segment increased 172% year-over-year and 98% quarter-over-quarter. During Q4, we saw a pickup in demand from enterprise and channel customers which we're upgrading their compute, storage and network infrastructure with more efficient CPU platforms. OEM appliance and large data center revenue was $5.5 billion, also representing 50% of total revenue compared with 72% in the prior quarter. Revenue in this segment increased 50% year-over-year and decreased 26% quarter-over-quarter.

For fiscal year '26, enterprise and channel revenue grew 39% and represented [ 31% ] of total revenue. The OEM appliance and large data center revenue grew 104% and represented 69% of total revenue. For fiscal year '26, we had one large data center/CSP customer, which represented 28% of revenue. By geography, the U.S. represented 71% of Q4 revenue. Asia represented 11%. Europe represented 8% and the rest of the world represented 10%. On a year-over-year basis, revenue in the U.S. grew 259%, Asia decreased 50%, Europe increased 4% and the rest of the world increased 296%. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, revenue in the U.S. grew 12%, Asia decreased 13%, Europe increased 25% and the rest of the world increased 1%.

Q4 non-GAAP gross margin was 17.6% versus our guidance of 8.2% to 8.4%. This was up from 10.1% in Q3. Gross margins improved by 750 basis points sequentially due to a better-than-anticipated customer and product mix, including the deferral of several contracts from Q4 fiscal year '26 to Q1 fiscal year '27 and perhaps a subsequent quarter. This favorable mix contributed approximately 75% of the gross margin improvement. Lower tariff costs and lower inventory reserves drove the remaining 25% of the gross margin improvement.

Q4 GAAP operating expenses were $455 million, up 44% year-over-year and 16% quarter-over-quarter on a non-GAAP basis. On a non-GAAP basis, operating expenses were $357 million, which was up 49% year-over-year and 28% quarter-over-quarter. The sequential increases in both GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses primarily reflected higher headcount-related expenses and sales and marketing expenses. Non-GAAP operating margin was [ 14.3% ] in Q4 compared with 7.2% in Q3. Other income and expense for Q4 was a net expense of $19 million, consisting of $61 million in interest and other income offset by $80 million in interest expense related to our convertible notes and revolving credit facilities. The Q4 tax provision was $290 million on a GAAP basis and $316 million on a non-GAAP basis. The Q4 tax GAAP tax rate was 19.7%, while the non-GAAP tax rate was 20.1%. For fiscal year '26, the GAAP tax rate was 19.9% compared with 12.9% in fiscal year '25.

The non-GAAP tax rate was 20.4% compared with 15.4% in fiscal year '25. Q4 GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.62 compared with our guidance range of $0.53 to $0.67. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.70 compared with our guidance range of $0.65 to $0.79. The results exceeded our guidance primarily due to higher gross margins. For fiscal year '26, GAAP diluted earnings per share was $3.26 compared with $1.68 in fiscal year '25. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $3.63 compared with $2.06 in fiscal year '25. The GAAP diluted share count increased sequentially from 692 million shares in Q3 to 705 million shares in Q4. The non-GAAP diluted share count increased from 709 million shares to 721 million shares over the same period.

Cash provided by operating activities in Q4 was $747 million compared with cash used in operating activities of $6.6 billion in the prior quarter. For fiscal year '26, cash used in operating activities was $6.8 billion compared with cash provided by operating activities of $1.66 billion in fiscal year '25.

Q4 closing inventory was $12.9 billion, up from $11.1 billion at the end of Q3. CapEx totaled $28 million in Q4 resulting in free cash flow of $722 million. For fiscal year '26, CapEx was $162 million compared with $127 million in fiscal year '25 as we invested in our expanding capacity globally.

During the quarter, we completed public equity offerings, raising $5.6 billion after offering expenses. Comprising $1.4 billion of common stock and $4.2 billion of mandatory convertible preferred shares. The proceeds from these offerings will be used primarily to support increased working capital needed to support our new orders. At quarter end, cash and cash equivalents totaled $7.5 billion. Bank borrowings and convertible note debt totaled $8.7 billion resulting in net debt of $1.2 billion compared with net debt of $7.5 billion at the end of the prior quarter.

Turning to the balance sheet and working capital metrics. The cash conversion cycle increased by 43 days from 106 days in Q3 to 149 days in Q4. Days of inventory increased by 13 days to 119 days from 106 days in the prior quarter as we built inventory in anticipation of higher revenues going into fiscal year '27. Days sales outstanding decreased by 26 days to 59 days from 85 days in Q3 as we realized collections from some large customers. Days payables outstanding decreased by 56 days to 29 days versus 85 days in Q3 due to a significant reduction in our average days payables between Q3 and Q4 due to the completion of some large AI GPU projects and the timing of payments to suppliers. Going forward, we expect the cash conversion cycle to normalize based on terms that we have in our current backlog.

Now turning to the outlook for Q1 fiscal year '27. We expect net sales to be in the range of $14.5 billion to $15.5 billion. GAAP diluted net income per share to be between $0.89 and $0.98 and non-GAAP diluted net income per share to be between $1.01 and $1.10. Based on the expected customer and product mix, we expect gross margin to be in the range of 10.4% to 10.8%. We successfully completed the issuance of $4.2 billion of mandatory convertible preferred shares in Q4. Due to that issuance, our GAAP and non-GAAP EPS is computed based on the 2-class method in which we allocated a portion of our net income for participating convertible preferred shares. This impacts our Q1 FY '27 EPS guidance and should be considered in all EPS calculations going forward. Please see the earnings release tables for further details.

GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $453 million, including approximately $127 million in stock-based compensation expenses which are excluded from non-GAAP operating expenses. The outlook for Q1 of fiscal year 2027 fully diluted GAAP earnings per share includes approximately $106 million and expected stock-based compensation expenses, net of tax effects of $32 million, which are excluded from non-GAAP diluted net income per common share. We expect other income and expense, including interest expense, to result in a net expense of approximately $45 million. The company's projections for Q1 fiscal year '27 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted net income per common share assume a GAAP tax rate of 20.1%, a non-GAAP tax rate of 20.5% and a fully diluted share count of 745 million shares for GAAP and 761 million shares for non-GAAP. Capital expenditures for Q1 are expected to be in the range of $50 million to $60 million. And for the full fiscal year '27 we expect net sales to be in the range of $65 billion to $72 billion.

Michael, we're ready for Q&A now.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital.

I have a few, if I could. And congrats on the strong results and the ongoing improvement in profitability here. And let me start just with that. Charles, Dave, what's the good way to think about what fiscal year '27 gross margins can be benefited from mix in June. It sounds like you're absorbing some of that mix from deal push out in September, it's still a nice improvement apples-to-apples and gross margin guide. Can you walk us through how we should think about sort of the puts and takes on the margins, mix, CPU, things like that, and number one, how should we think about -- what's the useful estimate for gross margin for fiscal year '27? And what may be the progression? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Okay. Thank you for the question. Yes, I mean we will be very carefully control of balance between revenue and profitability. As you know, high-volume GPU margin usually much lower. CPU, storage, IoT, enterprise application, on the other hand, have a higher margin. So we will try to balance between 2 verticals. Especially the last 12 months, we have continued to grow sales force in the enterprise an application -- server application, storage.

So looking forward, we will consistently growing our overall gross margin. Although, we will still grow very aggressive, very faster than GPU, but we will focus much more than before on enterprise CPU storage. And also at DCBBS product line is getting mature. So we are shipping more and more DCBBS hardware and also software service and some switch as well. So the DCBBS will be our long-term much better profit margin product line.

And so just to clarify before my second question, Charles, I believe I heard you say you anticipate margins to improve from September quarter level given the factors that you just mentioned. Did I hear you correctly there?

September, would you...

Yes. So we guided to [ 10.4% to 10.8% ] for September. And we're doing everything we can, as Charles mentioned, to find the best margins that we can.

Okay. That's great. And then the follow-up is, maybe just to dovetail off of Charles' CPU remarks, sounds like -- so you had 80% of revenue was AI in your Q3, 60% in Q4, looking for 80% again in Q1. Charles talked about taking on more CPU servers, storage and networking. What is a useful way to think about with that sort of 20% than not AI? What is that? And then if I could just squeeze in quickly. Any update on Board investigation, the Board [indiscernible], I assume it's coming close to completion, but any update there would be great too. And that's it for me.

Yes, it depends on customer mix. And when large data center order are not for sure, AI percentage will be higher. But when we say 80% will be AI, I believe that included 2 much segments. One is traditional AI. The other one is application AI, agentic AI or [ AG AI ]. So the pure AI will be about 60% to 70%, while another 10% to 20% AI will be CPU-based AI or kind of agentic AI [indiscernible] and the other 20% were a traditional server, storage, IoT, so targeted at 100%.

As to your second question, Ananda, we expect to provide an update shortly. And that's all we can share on this call.

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Cardoso with JPMorgan.

This is [indiscernible] for Joseph Cardoso. For my first question, I just wanted to double click on your robust orders, which you saw during the quarter. You mentioned [ $60 billion ] plus orders maybe anything in terms of customer concentration within that order growth, which you saw as well as any more incremental color in terms of what really was the driver behind such a robust uptick in orders there? And I have a follow-up.

Yes. I mean around $60 billion, I would like to say 70% AI, pure AI. The other 30% is the or CPU-based AI or kind of AI application. So overall, I believe our profit margin mix will be getting better.

Okay. Got it. And for my follow-up, I just wanted to ask in terms of you mentioned that you would achieve some success in terms of customer diversification where you have, I think, 9 customers, which are $1 billion-plus during FY '26. Anything in terms of the nature of those customers, maybe in terms of new cloud versus enterprises versus over customers? Any more incremental color there will be helpful.

Yes. So we have a lot of emerging NeoClouds and CSPs. And so they were -- and some enterprise customers that were in that mix that we mentioned.

Yes. The [indiscernible] is a CPU-based AI, for example, NVIDIA, we also have Vera CPU-based AI, that's for NVIDIA based AI ARM-based, right, and interior base. So now that AI is kind of a majority still GPU-based, but still, the CPU-based AI is also growing quickly especially for agentic AI application.

Your next question comes from the line of Asiya Merchant with Citi.

Two, if I may. One of them was just -- was there any change in buying patterns, specifically for large DC and CSP customers? I understand that there was a shipment delay into 1Q from what I understand the guide incorporates that the shipment from 4Q would be shipped into fiscal 1Q. But are you sensing any change in the buying patterns from these large data center CSP customers that you're predominant in. And because there seems to be some investor concern that many these customers are going more directly to ODMs and they have been typically to the likes of Super Micro? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Okay. Yes, for sure, I mean large data center always have power readiness, data center readiness concern, especially liquid cooling. So our customer base overall have a similar concern as well. But still, basically, the order, the shipment for September quarter, December quarter have been quite strong. And also, I mean, the shipment business model is a little bit special. Indeed quite special. We have an OEM business but we also cover ODM business. So we have lots of data center -- large data in the customer now and especially kind of NeoCloud. And at the same time, we are growing very aggressively for enterprise server, traditional server and storage.

So overall, we are kind of again, both ODM and OEM, we will continue to grow in most ways.

Okay. And for my follow-up, the liquid cool data centers, are you able to provide what percentage of revenues those are? And if you can give any further details on verticals between note versus these large data center/DSP customers that you have for the liquid cool data center?

As you know, I mean, we are one of the very early liquid cooling technology leader. 2024, for example, we ship, I guess, 80% plus the [indiscernible] the market. And now more and more [indiscernible] liquid cooling ready. And including GPU liquid cooling and CPU liquid coolling, like Vera Rubin and even Vera CPU-based. Lots of our Vera CPU-base will be liquid colling as well and some AMD inter CPU also liquid cooling.

So overall, liquid cooling will continue to grow quickly. And very soon, we have dominated our data center business, I believe.

Your next question comes from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs.

Thank you very much. Charles, you noted that you're making investments into the sales force to address the enterprise opportunity specifically. Can you talk about the progress that you've made here? And what further investments need to be made in both go-to-market and the product features and capabilities of Super Micro's portfolio in order to better address this opportunity? And if this run rate OpEx level is the right way to think about the full year?

Sure. So I'll address the question on the operating expenses. So there are certainly, some expenses that we expect to go up and others that we expect to come down. And so we think that the levels that we have will -- are at the proper level. And if you look at our historical growth rate in operating expenses, it's less than half of our revenue growth rate.

Yes. As a technology company, our investment in new technology continues to be very aggressive. For example, the speed switch, the optical technology. So overall, our data center total solution with our DCBBS centric and focus will be continuing very strong.

And could you talk more about the sales force and how you're engaging with this expanded enterprise customer set understanding that this is a broader opportunity than the types of engagements that Super Micro may have had in the past.

This is Mike Staiger. I just want to chime in on the sales force and some of the sales force changes. And you probably saw that we elevated a few of our individuals, [ Matt Bobar ], Chief Revenue Officer; [ Vic Mall ], as Chief Business Officer. And there's been a focus on efficiency and aligning the sales force with a solution sale element to address the AI opportunity ahead, which is supportive of better margins. So there's definitive actions in place to make those improvements, and we'll keep you posted as we go out through the year as we expand and make those changes to address the market opportunity.

As a technology leading a technology-leading company, before we are mostly focused on engineering, production, customer service. But now we're getting focused much more on the enterprise and growing our overall balance, especially enterprise as you know, the profit margin is always better, right? So we are growing our sales force aggressively now.

Your next question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

David, given the pace of GPU platform transitions, how are you managing inventory risk around each new generation? And what gives you the confidence that the record order backlog that you now have won't result in significant inventory exposure if customer deployment schedules or platform configurations change. I'm asking this because Super Micro has had some issues in the past? And I have a follow-up.

Sure. So I think everyone in the industry and our industry has to watch out for changes in technology. But with what we've found was with prices rising so fast, a lot of times now, the -- some of the old inventory does get resold at favorably. Nonetheless, as you point out, you don't want to get caught having to hold that inventory. There is risk in that. So what we do is we try to ensure as much as possible that we have noncancelable POs and we also try to match our procurement along with the shipment schedules as much as possible.

And indeed, other than that most of our product design based on building pro solution. So lot of our subsystem compatible optimize for different product line or even different generation of product. So that will help us in maintaining inventory when technology generation change.

Okay. As a follow-up, can I ask now that the business is scaling towards $70 billion of annual revenue, right, how should we think about working capital intensity and operating cash conversion in fiscal '27? I think Charles said something about this in his prepared remarks, I didn't fully catch that. But David, do you expect in fiscal '27 the growth to be self-funded now from operating cash flow or will the company need incremental external financing to support inventory and receivables beyond the rate that you recently had?

Sure, Ruplu. So I think as I mentioned in my prepared comments that we do expect the cash conversion cycle to improve and it's not -- the reason for that is when we look at our backlog, we have improved terms and -- which will help us on our cash flow conversion. So therefore, we expect that this will allow us to carry a greater volume of business. And so we're going to do everything possible to utilize our balance sheet, which is much stronger. And if you look at our current assets and our current liabilities, it's stronger than most companies that you'll see out on the market. And so we expect to use the strength of our balance sheet as well as our good customer base to help us fund our growth.

Yes. Once we take between $65 billion to $72 billion. I guess our cash flow now is pretty enough. But if they have a chance to grow much higher revenue, then we handed more cash flow, for example, $80 billion or beyond $80 billion. So there are some possibilities like that, but we will carefully control.

Your next question comes from the line of [ George Notter ] with Wolfe Research.

Wanted to ask if you're seeing any relief or shift in sort of the AI pricing environment overall? And then sort of just like the balancing revenues and margins commentary, is that -- should we take that to mean that you guys are walking away from some low-margin deals right now? Or are you sort of managing some of the proof point deals that you guys have done on the next-generation racks in the past? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes, that's why we forecast between $65 billion to $72 billion. So we'd like to support as many customers as we can, but the business has to be healthy. The margin has to be at this minimum financial kind of demand.

Got it. Okay. And then just to dive a little bit deeper in the traditional server and storage benefits right now. Is a lot of that sort of stand-alone CPU demand? What is sort of like the attach rate or the sort of synergies with the AI side of the business look like? And then how are margins sort of apples-to-apples trending in that business?

Yes. Very good question. Yes, in last many years, we fully focus on GPU market, AI market, but when the company become bigger, I mean yes, we circle back to focus on enterprise CPU-based market as well, including enterprise and kind of industrial PC storage-based application. So we are going to make our balance between gross revenue and net profit become a much more healthy balance.

And I think, by the way, I'll add to that, I think we did a reasonable job year-over-year because we grew our top line by 78%, and we grew our bottom line by almost the same amount. So I think that shows on a year-over-year basis, what goals we're after.

Your next question comes from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yes. Congrats on amazing gross margin results. Charles, do you think the value add that Super Micro can add to NVIDIA ecosystem being different from the ecosystem somewhat implied by your discussion in the earnings deck around the ARM-AGI CPU platform?

Yes. Still lots of chance. We can add our value. For example, our DCBBS solution, they're all for customers, a complete data center buildout support, not just GPU, CPU storage. But older major components for data center. And other than that, lots of agentic AI application. We have a lot of optimization. For example, Vera-based solution, Rubin [indiscernible] based and those other workstation base. We see still a lot of room. We can differentiate our product [indiscernible].

I guess what I'm trying to dry that is that NVIDIA is designing full systems and where you guys come in is helping end customers customize those full systems. But with the ARM AGAI CPU platform, perhaps there's more full system design help that Super Micro can bring to the table relative to NVIDIA ecosystem?

Yes. I mean, yes, for example, better time to market, when able the CPU chip are available will be with our architecture, we are able to provide a better time to market and quality, not just design quality, production quality, deployment quality and service kind of work with customers for the whole data center deployment and pulling data center to operation and maintain high availability, make sure customers have a minimal value system. So we see indeed more and more customers appreciate our partnership. So it's not just buy and go is kind of buy and work together.

Okay. Great. And then David, just real quickly, you mentioned that the backlog has improved terms with respect to cash conversion cycle. Is those improved terms because of customers? Or is it because you're seeing a higher percentage of that backlog represent repeat orders and repeat orders potentially have more favorable terms.

Yes. So you broke up just a little bit, Nehal, but let me answer what I thought I heard you ask, and that is we really had a combination of 2 things. We had new customers come in. And -- but we also had existing customers that we're already selling to. And we tightened -- really, we tightened the terms of those contracts. So that's what gives us a little bit of visibility into our cash conversion cycle.

Your next question comes from the line of Brandon Nispel with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask about DCBBS. You previously guided for that to be about 20% of gross profit for this year. Could you maybe update us on how that contributed to revenue and gross profit for this year and how you're thinking about that for 2027? And I have a follow-up.

Yes. Thank you for that question. I mean, yes, DCBBS is a big project. I mean, we provide a data center hardware and also software -- management software and demand networking make sure customers have is availability and efficient maintenance. So it's a kind of combination of all. So for example, management software, earlier next quarter, we will provide a proactive service packaging that's the feature, the service to maintain customers' maximum availability, make sure order server they invest are working instead of failure and waiting there, for example.

So I mean, we see a very good -- very big room to grow, including end of switch -- high-bandwidth switch and the whole networking design management to -- so we see a big room to grow. 20% should be not far away.

Got it. Thanks, Charles. And David, unpacking your comments around gross margin was 75% coming from mix and 25% coming from tariff and inventory write-downs. It's about $700 million for mix and $230 million from the other bucket on my math. So within mix, I'm curious, what did vendor rebates look like this quarter? And then within tariffs, did you book a tariff rebate?

Yes, that's a great question. And let me say, we did not book a tariff rebate in our numbers. We are actively pursuing refunds, but we did not take a benefit for those until we see them. But we do -- we're not -- I think the rest of the industry is expecting that the tariffs may go back up maybe not be in the same fashion, but they may go back up. So that's why we still kind of look at this as perhaps a onetime benefit, but time will tell.

So I think that we had -- but as to rebates, your question about rebates, we did have, I think, a little bit higher rebates because we did -- we had a different mix of business, more rebate late this quarter -- this past quarter.

I appreciate the color. And if I could do one more. On the gross margin guidance, I think it's 10.6% for the first quarter, if we were to normalize that for tariffs and inventory write-downs. How do you see that from a year-over-year standpoint? I know from a reported basis, it's up. But last year, you definitely had more tariffs in the numbers and definitely more inventory write-downs that hurt those results. So I was wondering if you could sort of help us from a normalized year-over-year perspective in the first quarter.

Yes. So I -- my comparisons were more quarter-to-quarter where we came down a lot on tariffs and on excess and obsolete inventory. Year-over-year, I think the same things are going to hold true with tariffs coming down a lot in this quarter with the suspension of the IEEPA tariffs. And I think there's no question that we had good results on our [ E&O ] this quarter. And so that was what we would consider event.

Your final question comes from the line of Victor Chiu with Raymond James.

I wanted to circle back on one of Charles previous comments. Can you just provide some color around how much of your backlog and end demand are being impacted by the shift towards agentic and inference workloads from trading workloads. Are you observing kind of this inflection right now in your results? And I guess, how does the inflection kind of impact the mix of shipments between CPUs and GPUs, any medium-term and kind of going forward?

Yes, kind of it's basically complicated mix. I would have to say still [ 70-some ] GPU, maybe high 20% in CPU. But still, some GPU now is agentic GPU or kind of agentc GPU. So it's a kind of -- in terms of profit margin, the AG GPU between traditional GPU and CPU. So it's a complicated combination. But overall, with our DCBBS is growing quickly. So I believe we should be able to maintain the profit margin we plan for.

I got it. And just -- are you seeing kind of a shift at all? Any changes in this? Or I understand the mix that you kind of alluding to, but is this -- how does that compare to maybe a year quarter in terms of kind of the workloads influencing that?

Yes. Long-term GPU percentage will continue to grow, I believe. But again, a lot of GPU will become -- we are using application, agentic AI, enterprise AI. So overall GPU market, I believe, will be not just big, but also get into every vertical. And that's what we believe, at this moment.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

[Audio Gap] We've got Michael Staiger, who is the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Thanks for having us.

We also have...

Good to see you. We also have Krishna Shankar, who is the VP of Finance; and we have Ian Tolle, who's the Head of IR in the audience. So thanks, guys. Thanks for coming today.

I've got lots of questions. I want to start with a question focused on customers. So Michael, when I think about Super Micro, you guys have done phenomenally well with the Tier 2 CSPs and large data center customers. As you look out to expand the business over the next couple of years, how do you see that customer set expanding? Where do you see expansion? And I guess a question that I get from clients is, if you're doing so well with this customer set, what are the pluses and minuses of trying to get a different customer set? Why even go for that?

Yes. That's a nice introduction. I wouldn't have to say that if you would just step back and look at the foundation of the organization and the company and where we came from, it was all enterprise customers. And if we're just talking about the customer conversation, which is important, what is an enterprise is -- are NeoClouds enterprises, et cetera. We grew up in the X86 world, where we delivered more power and more compute per footprint for customers back in the day when those elements weren't as important as they are today. So going back to where we have been more successful as of late as technology forward customers that want to get maximize the value of the platforms that they're providing to their customers either in a service provider environment or enterprises that are serving their enterprise customers. And so we're focused on the application optimization of that.

And to your point about customers, of course, AI is top of mind, how to leverage those platforms and NVIDIA has been leading the charge, but we have -- in that grouping platforms with AMD, we have platforms with Intel, ARM, others. And those will be application optimized for those customer sets. And when you think about why go after all these others versus focusing on one market, if we serve the highest element of the stack, the compute platform and the integrated system in the form of DCBBS, which we'll talk about, there'll be more customers that will be attracted to what we're bringing to the market, and it will help fuel growth in a market that's expanding quite rapidly right now.

Got it. So Michael, when we think about the AI server space, right, what generally the discussion ends up being is the trade-off of revenue versus margins. So help us understand like how does management trade that off, right? And when you look at the opportunity set that you have, is it better for Super Micro to try and gain more market share? Or is it the time to focus on margins or both? Just give us your thoughts and management's thought on this.

So our first thought is to serve customers, right? From that perspective, we have a lot of customers coming to us asking for solutions. And so the trade-off over solving a customer problem where we can leverage that platform for other customers downstream, there may be some margin give up there, so to speak, as we develop those -- that platform. That's kind of gone under the covers. So we're very focused on the margin element and optimizing the solution for the customer and bringing more to them. And we've always done that. And now we have more shots on goal to do that.

So as the consequence will likely be "market share" I know the market likes to look at, hey, who's gaining share, who's winning share. But right now, it really does appear that there is an expansion of opportunity. At the same time, differentiation is going to accelerate, and we're going to bring those products in an expanded format to the marketplace. So it's a balance. I know it's not like we would like one versus the other, but it's a balance, and we're trying to drive the growth of the company. And again, if the size of the market is anything what our partners talk about, $2 trillion to $4 trillion, 2, 3 years out, and we say 10% of that market, it's a $200 billion revenue opportunity, and we're closing on [ $40 billion ] as we speak. So we have plenty of room to grow, and we have plenty of opportunity sets here to expand the margin underneath of this.

Yes. It sounds like a very exciting time to be in this market. But one of the things that I've noticed is over the last 2 years, if you look at the competitor set, right, it's not just the OEMs that one thinks of like Dell and HPE, you've got ODMs, you've got EMS companies. Everybody seems to be doing a data center rack for NVIDIA. So talk to us about Super Micro's competitive advantages that you see. Like where is like you were a first mover when ChatGPT came out. You were first to market doing AI servers. But talk to us about your enduring competitive advantage.

Well, at the core of the organization has always been bringing engineering skill set, scale and manufacturing, if you want to call it that, to the customer and solutioning the customer. So anyone can potentially assemble something, but can they integrate it? Can they make it work as a system? Do they have the management software? Do they have the servicing capabilities? Do they have the full stack? And we're -- with DCBBS, we're very focused on bringing those solutions to the customers above and beyond just selling a server. In the older days, this transaction was a server. We looked as a server company and now racks. So the backward view is like, oh, someone can build the rack like great, but can you get 1,000 of these racks to be integrated and work together? Can you get the reliability of those systems to the point where if you're a service provider, your uptime is 99.9. And if another assembler provides less of a figure, a lesser uptime, it costs them money.

So we're delivering tokenomics for these customers, and we're differentiating rapidly and with other and different platforms. So again, the market is expanding. There's a lot of players in the food chain, so to speak, on the supply side, et cetera, to make this happen. And it seems like the whole entire industry is focused on building out "AI" or leveraging this technology to the benefit of a business to mankind to GDP, et cetera.

Got it. So Michael, what clients are focused on now is the expansion of AI into enterprise and specifically using AI for inferencing as opposed to model building, right? So again, coming back to the fact that Super Micro has been phenomenally successful with the Tier 2 CSPs, the large model builders. But when we think about the enterprise space, and I'm talking about like, say, medium -- mid-tier enterprise or at some point, even small, medium business. Do you think that Super Micro offers something that its competitors can't? And how do you -- is that a space that you want to even look at?

Yes. So again, it kind of goes to solutions. So if you have an off-the-shelf solution even in an X86 type of world or an off-the-shelf solution for inference, right? One size does not fit all from an application standpoint from a customer. And we have a large OEM customer that has literally -- we have 20 different system builds off of X86 to optimize for all the verticals. And those systems are running of the S&P 500 all over the place. We have customers that have gone to find solutions in the retail space where they need [ ruggedy ], whatever it is, we're able to put that together. And the strength of the company would be on the manufacturing side, on the design side.

So we can design something for them, and we're fairly nimble to put them together for those particular customers, and we keep them. And they tend to grow with us. And a perfect example, I don't know if I should be naming names, it would be Twitter, where we provided the X86 platforms and that as the technology advanced from 140 characters to video, et cetera. And as the organization grew with their capabilities, like we've been able to deliver more and more differentiated or optimizations for them to benefit the organization.

So it's all about solving customer problems. Customers have plenty of problems. AI is expanding. There's applications that have not yet been full-scale delivered that are yet to be that will be the driver of more systems and more use cases. So we look to supply those types of customers.

Got it. As a follow-up to that, a question we keep getting from clients is when they look at Dell and HPE, the thought is that they have lots of enterprise customers. They're well entrenched in that customer set, and they provide services that are tailored to enterprises. Talk to us about the services that you can provide to these type of enterprise clients. Is it true to say that you don't have that level of service? Or are people mistaken in that? And can you talk to us about your level of service?

Yes. So on that front, we stood up some of the largest clusters. We have some of the largest suppliers or service providers. There's more coming on stream. They need support. We're there for them. We're there for our broader base of customers. I think if you look at the traditional IDC kind of Gartner share of the overall "market" we're, I hate to use the word number two, but we've grown up from that perspective. The organization is expanding to meet the opportunity set in front of us to support those customers. And so our service capabilities are improving in real time and the go-to-market is improving real time.

And yes, for sure, our competitors have some brand names and some history and some legacy that helps in some cases and hurts in a lot of other cases. And if we're talking about innovation, bar none, like customers know by the virtue of us serving some of the most advanced customers out there that we have systems that we can solve their problems, and they're going to come to us, and we'll support them in any way we can and develop that.

Got it. Just to round out the discussion on customer types. You've talked about sovereigns as being another class of customers. I think you had an announcement with DataVolt a couple of years ago. So how is that customer set evolving? And do you think that they have different needs that Super Micro can address?

So from a sovereign perspective, and I can't speak for every nation. I mean there's plenty of them, the anticipation in the design plans. I think we just made a recent announcement with -- connection with Spain, Catalonia, as an example, something that we've done also in Korea. So there's lots of activity there. And I would imagine that they're a little more -- a little slower governments, if you want to call it that. But at the same time, I think that they're executing some of their initial deployments through some of the NeoClouds.

So you're seeing NeoClouds that are forming to serve the particular areas and the sovereigns will want localized data control, et cetera, have a different set of circumstances, but still we'll want a highly tuned, efficient, fully enabled system, so a total solution. So it kind of fits into the DCBBS mode that we're presenting to them to solution those customers. And so I think the activity there is good. It's phenomenal, and there's lots more to do in that particular segment. So yes, that's what I would say about that.

So for those of us who don't understand this term DCBBS, can you just kind of help explain what that is? And how do customers order it? Like would a data center operator say, give me 3 DCBBS and -- how does that work?

So it's tough on the excel line item for you. So I get that, right? Like what is it? So recently, at COMPUTEX, we showed a pretty broad swath of the different components that go into the data center. And so what we're trying to do for customers, because of a customer saying, "Hey, I need a couple of servers, right?" Well, the conversation is like, well, has gone to "I need a couple of racks." And we've noticed that over time that a couple of racks, they're having a difficult time in integrating those racks and connecting it through the networking stack or through the storage stack, quite frankly, to power cooling.

So what we're doing is designing or helping them design a full suite of solutions to fit the data center, not every data center is the same, not every power configuration is the same and some have different constraints and requirements. So when we -- when they start talking about platform, we're rolling out AI, we're on the Blackwell platform. We want to be on this platform. What can you do for us to enable this? So it's enablement technology and data center building blocks. So we're building data centers. So it's no longer like you come to us for a part, which would be easy for you to model if it was just a part, right?

So on that standpoint, we talked about the margin element. So -- and it also ties to availability and readiness of the customers. So we've had customers that have had issues with power at the site or there were some networking components that weren't at the site and the networking element held up the verification of a system so that revenue recognition would occur. So there's all kinds of things because it's very complicated to bring all these parts and components together for customers to do it. And we said this before in the past, the hyperscalers have teams of engineers that do these things for different platforms across their footprint. And we all noticed that they're using different platforms for different problems, right?

So the broader market will ultimately go that route and DCBBS is us to enable those customers to do that. And we've stated that it's margin accretive from our perspective. It's also a way to solution the customers so that we have the competitive element is in our favor. We are doing the engineering and the manufacturing for the most part here in the U.S.A., working with our partners in the U.S.A. and addressing these customers and providing these solutions. And it's working. The growth rates of the company are excellent, and we're working on getting to a higher margin run rate as we exit the calendar year and into '27.

So you brought up a couple of things that I want to touch on. First, on component availability, right? So are there still parts that you're having problems getting? And is that impacting revenues? And you've given a certain guidance for the year. Like how should we think about the impact of these component shortages on your revenues?

Well, there's a lot of components that go into a rack, a lot of components that go into a data center. So it's pretty difficult to isolate which ones. I think prior to our earnings report, The Street was concerned about memory and memory availability and the margin compression that we see. And obviously, through the reported results, we showed that, that was not a constraint for us at that point in time. So we're working through it. We're working through -- we have a pretty good idea of what our customers want. We're a major supplier. We're a major buyer at the same time. We're working through the supply chain with all our vendors to alleviate any problems, if you recall, during the COVID period, not that we want to talk about COVID because we're tired of it.

But the ability to change -- interchange components and parts really helps us in our design. So I think the supply element will just work through as we've shown in real time to deliver to customers. So it's probably always going to be something that we have to manage, and we're pretty good at it. We've been doing it for 32 years, going on 33 years.

I want to talk about manufacturing capacity. So are you at the point or Super Micro at the point now that you can deliver 6,000 racks per month? And how many of those can be liquid cooled? And when we look at your footprint, what goes into management's decision to add more capacity? Because I think your existing capacity can support a lot more revenue than what you're guiding for this year.

Yes. So Charles has always been foot forward on making sure that we have the capacity to serve customers and customers at scale. So now we're a material scale player. The split is 3,000 liquid, 3,000 air cooled. There's still a pretty strong market for air cooled. I mean most of the data centers out there are air cooled. Through DCBBS, by the way, we can retrofit and improve the cooling or the thermal footprint for our customers, which will give them more performance so they get more for their dollar out of their existing purchase. So there's some interesting benefits there. But the capacity element through automation, through optimization without having to build more, I'm sure we can lift those numbers as we move forward.

That all said, we've made some announcements, and we have been expanding capacity. And so the view that we have on a long-term basis of the volumes that we think that we'll be able to serve is there, and we're putting that capacity in place and the CapEx required is fairly light from our perspective, we manage through it. And it puts us in a good position when we do come to multiples of scale customers, they know that we can support them, and we can support them for many, many years to come.

Got it. Let's talk about margins. So margin performance last quarter was good. There were some onetime items, but you're guiding for better margins even this quarter, I mean, 8%? Talk to us about how you see margins progressing? I mean, should investors think that there's a path to double-digit margins this year? Or just how aggressive should investors be in thinking about margin progression?

So the end markets and the environment is very dynamic. So I think we all know that. From a margin perspective, we've been discussing or talking about the path to double digits on that front. We've shown that we can get there. It depends on the customer and product mix. So some customers might have less differentiation in the build. But the solutioning element and the diversification of the customer base will be very helpful. It will be helpful to be able to deliver new innovation in the form of AI CPU systems that are built on x86 or ARM type platforms where our competitors might not be there yet and they might not be yet there to incorporate the elements that would stand those systems up in the total solutions.

So when we do those things in the backdrop of large NVIDIA type deployments on balance, and we will get to a much higher margin revenue run rate. And we're kind of looking at a step up over time as we exit calendar year. As you know, our year is over June 30. And fiscal year '27, we haven't provided guidance specifically on that yet, obviously, we do at the end of the year. But the cadence of the business suggests that there's just a lot more to do with customers and a lot more product to bring to the market that could be margin enhancing, and we should be well ahead of competitors.

Got it. I have a lot more questions on this, and maybe we'll come back to this. But I want to ask you over the last 1.5 years, there have been several headlines that we believe have been distracting, if not have hurt the brand of Super Micro. I want to ask you, how does leadership at Super Micro hold itself accountable for the actions and operations of the company? And what measures is management putting in so that it can address investor concerns?

So we've done quite a few things under the covers to address -- I wouldn't say concerns, but to improve the strength of the organization. Certainly, some of the headlines haven't been fantastic. So we're making clear steps, and we've articulated those steps over time to the market as we've gone through. So I think there's not a lot to add today in that respect. But we're conscious on continuing to -- continue to improve processes. At the same time, customers realize that the technology that we're bringing to the market is superior. And we'll balance the 2, and we'll overcome any of the obstacles that have potentially occurred in the past.

So I want to touch on two things. One is on the recent export compliance issues. I know that Super Micro is having an internal investigation. When should we expect any findings? Is there a timeline for that?

So from that perspective, we didn't provide a timeline because obviously, we're not -- it's independent. I would imagine that, that would be wrapping up in reasonable short order. And when we get the results, we will share them with the public.

And then the second thing I want to address is like you had some issues with internal controls that you were addressing. Talk to us about like how many issues were there? How many have you addressed? And again, what's the -- how should investors think about the timeline for that?

So I think the one thing you have to take a step back on is the explosive growth of the organization and the changes from the processes internal, and these are system level upgrades to SAP, et cetera, linking them to inventory management, MRP, et cetera so -- CRM systems. So we're going through those growing pains as we speak, and all of those will need to be fully tested and we'll need a period of proven success. And we're tracking to do that. It's a very -- it's a large effort as we want to get that aligned and move forward and to support the next leg of growth that we see coming. So that's where we're at there.

So Michael, this is a working capital-intensive business, right? How does management make that trade-off of how much credit to give to customers from a days of receivable standpoint? How much inventory to have and when you come to market for more funds? How is that decision made? And how do you see working capital and free cash flow trending over the next couple of years?

So I think if you take a step back and look at the product set and you take a look at what we're going to bring to the market and take a look at the margin profile and that we have said or articulated that the customer base should expand. The DCBBS element will contribute. There will be more differentiated product across different zones, different marketplaces. Those things will compress the -- should compress the working capital cycle and alleviate those things so the cycle times. So we've chewed through some really large contracts in the past from time to time and those cycle times have been out of the 90-day period, which show that kind of strain, but they always catch up, so to speak.

So we're conscious of that. And I think the margin improvements and the diversification on the customer side should help that. All that said, okay, the pace of which customers are trying to do and the programs that they have in place, if they still stay at this pace, I mean that's -- there could be some pushes and pulls on the timing of getting that working capital cycle compressed to the point where it's optimal, and we're buying shares back in like we've done in the past. So that's what I would say there.

So when we were talking earlier, you mentioned a couple of names like AMD, beyond NVIDIA, there are other companies with accelerators. Is Super Micro qualified to build the Helios rack, the MI450s that are coming up? Or do you expect Super Micro to get qualified? And do you think that you're going to be building racks for AMD as well?

So they're a fantastic partner. We work very well with them, very closely with them. And I am sure that we will be -- we're already delivering AMD-based products that we'll be providing those for our customers and supporting them as we move forward. So I don't think there's a question there. Will we be doing it? It's a matter of like when will we be doing it when customers and the products that line up for delivery.

So there's kind of a strange situation happening in the industry where if you look at non-GPU servers or non-GPU server racks, I mean, a lot of manufacturing companies are saying that their margins are better on those versus AI GPU servers maybe because of competition. So when you think about Super Micro's focus, would Super Micro ever consider maybe increasing your percent of revenue from non-accelerated racks, which I think you said 80% of your revenue was from AI-related or GPU-related servers. Talk to us about that. I mean, is that a focus for the company?

That's an absolute focus. I mean, again, historically, like we grew up in the X86 world, right, supplying customers. And if you take a look at customer behavior, 10% of the customers are looking for the -- just roughly, right, the best performance and they chew that performance up and they'll buy the next set as soon as it comes out. And then there's 10% of the customer base that is the lowest price. So you balance those out, that's 20% of the market that's like ideal for -- potentially for Super Micro, right? So we've been busy with the AI side, but those are enterprise customers. The NeoClouds are serving the enterprise. So indirectly, there's an enterprise component. There's a heavy dose of CPUs in the AI systems themselves. So people aren't really calculating that.

But as you move forward and you look at serial-based Agentic behavior, we will have systems optimized for those customers with our partners, and we will deliver a lot of volume in that space. And again, you mentioned competition. This highly optimized and flexible manufacturing environment is kind of contra to a large -- we're stamping out 1 million units, and we can't change our line for anyone. So I think the future looks really bright for this, for us, and we're very focused on bringing the brand because we've been so successful with these higher-end systems to the rest of the market. So it's 100% focus of the organization.

So a lot of component suppliers are asking for long-term contracts. I mean, the memory guys, the HDD guys. What does Super Micro think about this? Because if you have such high revenue growth, would it make sense for you to kind of like guarantee some supply over many years?

So on that front, we don't typically talk about what our contracts are with -- on the supply side. But we've been very effective at managing that and working with our partners. I'm sure they would love us to sign 5 years at like up 100%, right? So I don't know if we want to do that. So we've been very, I would say, frugal, but very focused on that element. We kind of have an idea of what we need at a base level. And so we're trying to keep that in balance in real time. And I think it's an art as opposed to a science. It's partially -- it's a slight competitive advantage, actually not slight, a pretty big competitive advantage to be able to manage the supply side.

When I look at Super Micro's revenues, I think most of your revenues today are from the U.S. or from Asia. You also have some revenues, I guess, from Europe. How do you see the European market? And when you think about investments, and I'll ask you about CapEx and OpEx, do you think that there's more investments to be done to grow your presence in Europe?

We have a good presence in Europe. We have some really good customers that are on stream there that are big and healthy. We see more. I said earlier, we signed some things with -- in Europe, Southern Europe that look pretty compelling. And I think there's lots of opportunity there. So there's no -- we're not lacking opportunity in any zone in the world. We tend to respond where demand is and work as fast as we can to help those customers.

So look, we've got about a minute left. Talk to investors about what they should expect from Super Micro over the next year. What are they missing about the Super Micro story? What's the takeaway?

I think the takeaway is that we have a fully fleshed out a product offering that's differentiated. We're solving customer problems. We're at the forefront on the AI side and then powering whether it's CPU-based Agentic or it's AI learning, so to speak, the machine learning or not the machine learning, but those elements, we have all those. We're looking at moving margins higher. We think there's a couple of hundred billion-dollar opportunity for the organization itself. And if you map out the valuation and the fact that we're trying to deliver shareholder value over the long term and build a much, much durable, larger organization. We've been doing that under the covers as we speak and materially larger than we were the year before and the year before and the year before and ironing all those things out and becoming a major -- we're already a major player, but a much larger player.

Okay. I think we've covered a lot of topics, Michael. Thank you...

Thanks for having us. Thanks, awesome.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. I'm Samik Chatterjee. I cover the hardware and networking companies at JPMorgan. For the next fireside chat, I have the pleasure of hosting Super Micro and from Super Micro, Michael Staiger, who is the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development.

Michael, thanks for being here at the conference. Thank you for your time.

Maybe let's start with the broader question. Super Micro initially to investors was known as a server vendor with the advent of AI, the company moved into being a rack vendor, you now do fully liquid cooling integration. You've now rolled out plans to do DCBBS, which is your data center building block solutions, which includes compute rack, switching, et cetera. So a broad range of capabilities, and that's expanded over time. Just highlight to us or maybe talk -- flesh out a bit more how you're thinking about the addressable market and expanding those? What's the strategy going forward on that front?

Yes. Great. Thanks for having me. So it's interesting that the evolution of the company has been growth and empowering customers and bringing solutions to the market. And if you were to take the view of our platform providers that the market is a $2 trillion to $4 trillion in the short term. And right now, we're 8%, 9% in supplying our customers of that market, and you apply that math to the out years, it implies a $200 billion revenue opportunity for the company.

Now if you go a little backwards into the -- into how we get there, and I think we characterized on our recent earnings call total solutions provider, data center provider. So from parts to pieces to servers to racks to more integration. And I think you've heard some others at the conference talk about the speed at which customers are moving and the needs that they have. And we would argue that in between the software and the silicon layer, there's a significant amount of value add to bring to our customers.

So -- and we've always talked about application optimization and architecting those systems for those customers to capture that. So it's difficult for me to tell you what the exact TAM is outside of the fact that we'll have a growing piece of it. And from that perspective, we're very well positioned.

Okay. So maybe just keep going on that thread. How do you think about the margin opportunity that, that provides you? As you go more into either DCBBS or more racks than doing individual servers, what is the margin opportunity?

Yes. So we've had an interesting margin progression over the years. Again, I think the -- if you look backwards, there was a significant amount of thrust on getting some customers to market and standing up some large footprints and you can see the power in which they're moving and the speed they're moving. So from that perspective, as our customers now on a continual path of growing and expanding the opportunity set for different platforms and bringing more of the systems together. You recall that there were some pushouts or delays, right?

So one of the elements of the pushouts and delays kind of wraps around what we're doing with DCBBS basically total solutioning to the customer, right? So the customer is not waiting. So time to online becomes paramount. So they can get their services in front of their customers so they can drive revenue with the material sums of dollars that they're spending on the equipment themselves. So it kind of is a full-scale wraparound of the strategy that we're deploying for the customers.

And so in that speed and that cadence is faster we can get these products to market, the faster we can architect these things at DCBBS, we're talking about 20% baseline gross margins on top of the rack build type margins. And over time, we expect that the solutioning will become a material part of the -- a large part of the business and it will change the margin structure as we go forward. Quite frankly, at the same time, it will be pretty supportive of turns and working capital needs.

Got it. And maybe lastly on that front. Talk about the competitive set of companies that you go up against? How does it change when you look at these different parts that you're more vertically integrating into how does the competitive set change for the company?

So we kind of take a view of a customer approach first, right? So -- and I know everyone out there has a view of, well, there's a couple of OEM competitors that we have. There's ODM competitors. We'll leave names off the table. But when the customers come to us, they're generally looking at how they can get their applications through that system faster.

And when I look at what we're doing and the platforming that we're doing for our customers, generally, we're first to market because we can actually turn the systems, the silicon makers, the platform providers of the world, we can get their systems into customers' hands -- and right now, that speed is starting to accelerate. We're talking about inferencing. We're talking about agentic AI, and there's specialty or systems that are developed around those particular platforms that we feel that will lead in the marketplace. And the core customer set will expand and they'll start using some of these things agents will be -- basically could be CPU-based or it could be GPU-based.

But whatever the customer needs, we will develop that for that customer. And that -- when you do those things, we don't have a commodity-like build, so to speak, which is what kind of the prior server world, if you want to call it, was thought to be. It's all commoditized. But we're taking these pieces and these parts and components and putting them together, the memory, the drives, et cetera, and making something special for customers that is -- should be margin accretive as we go forward and will wrap DCBBS around it. yes, NVIDIA platforms, we support a significant -- every form factor that they have. We do the same thing with AMD, Intel, Arm, any system, any silicon, any rack, any data center.

Okay. Great. So DCBBS, let's talk about the portfolio there. I mean the offering includes a broad range of solutions, like that solution has a broad range of products you can integrate with it. How are you making the decisions in terms of make versus buy? Do you eventually get to a point where you're developing proprietary IP for most of those components? Or are you looking to buy third party and then integrate it?

So we like to maintain the flexibility, and we've always had the ethos of design and develop it internally ourselves. And so in general, as we move forward, then we'll take other -- obviously, take other components and incorporate those. Right now, some of the activity in DCBBS is around the power, the cooling, actually, we lead on the cooling front, we have some innovations there.

There will be memory side cars, the CXL, CMXL kind of opportunity sets, and we'll be able to wrap them around the systems that were delivered to the customers in the form of DCBBS. So I don't think any -- every customer is going to take all the particular components. It depends on what their storage and networking strategy is. But over time, we'll -- and you probably know and have seen, we have relationships with many of the providers and the storage vendors, and we'll build the back end of it and we'll optimize on that front.

And those are higher margins in general -- and we will be doing more and more of that and typically shy away from purchasing anything. So we're also not and want to be flexible because some of these architectures will change and some that are wanted is going to be the next thing might actually be the next big thing. So we don't want to make a material bet in any one particular category, but we'll develop and optimize them over time.

And let's touch on the software stack and the services. Those things too will be are a part. I think last quarter, we did $140 million in software and services, and we think that we can exit the year -- the calendar year at $1 billion.

Okay. Okay. Maybe let's talk about your competitors a bit more. You talked about the ODMs and how you differentiate them. But how do you differentiate relative to companies like Dell or HPE? And what do you think is the strategic moat that doesn't enable them to do the customization that you're doing for your customers?

Well, we're Silicon Valley based. We're -- I think we've publicly announced that we've expanded our capabilities there. We have significant footprints. We're next to all of our platform providers. We're working with them in design and integration in real time. We haven't outsourced or design portion, the engineering portion or the manufacturing portion.

So we generally can control everything that goes into the system element so that we can turn the next generation or the coming generation or quite frankly, make the current generation better with enhancements. So that control plane is very important to a lot of our customers. And so it's a huge differentiator. Another differentiator is scale sourcing, scale manufacturing, scale engineering. And so those things are pretty important. And that's -- I think that's why we're almost 10% of the market.

Okay. Similarly, NVIDIA has expressed interest in more vertical integration over time as well. Do you -- how do you envision that you convince your customers that a customized solution is the better approach than what they would call like a reference architecture, for example.

Well, I think all of our vendors, our platform providers have some form of a reference architecture, right? So the end customer knows what the baseline is. And so it's been broadly discussed at NVIDIA's "taking more control over the design." There's a lot of elements in the design are far more advanced than the prior one. So each step of the way in the evolution of, let's say, server to rack data center has become more complex and more integrated and more difficult. So the co-design, so to speak, is an important piece of this.

And so we're keeping pace at that, if not moving it forward. So we'll help them for sure. But at the same time, if you look at what's happening in the end markets, there's a lot of other platforms that are in demand or use cases that are emerging that expand beyond just being tied to one platform, which is kind of how we got to this point. So the differentiation is there, is we're optimizing for all those different platforms, and we'll be well ahead of our competitors in delivering those.

So maybe continuing on NVIDIA. We have this upcoming Vera Rubin platform or right now where they're shipping out the Vera Rubin platform relative to Blackwell or Hopper in the past. How are you thinking about the volume opportunity as well as the pricing opportunity for Super Micro within those deployments?

Well, for starters, I think it's the back half of the year is I think what we've been telling folks. From a standpoint of volume, their volumes could be pretty large. But at the same time, there's a significant amount of other products in the stack that customers need. Not every customer is going to be a Vera Rubin customer. There's other customers that are looking at scale platforms to take advantage of Vera Rubin in the form of agentic CPU, AI CPU kind of -- so we'll integrate all those for our customers.

And not only will they integrate, but we'll see if we can put together a solution set for them to run that. So when we get to the Vera Rubin element, we won't be just assembling sheet metal. We'll be delivering solutions alongside with -- to leverage the platform and/or what are the other platforms that customers are going to wind up using to leverage their workloads.

Okay. But how are you thinking about pricing in terms of -- is the step-up similar to when you went from Hopper to Blackwell? Or maybe help us just framework that in terms of...

I don't think there's some generalized pricing that's been tossed around and it is higher. So we'll just work through the transition. We don't have details on numbers at this point in time or guidance for that matter from that product set.

Okay. But it should be good. what are you seeing in terms of customer demand for alternative GPUs like AMD and others? Like is that pipeline? How big is that pipeline? Is it building well?

The pipeline, I would say, is building, is big. I mean it's evident in the marketplace. It's evident in the prices of the platform providers. So all of a sudden, folks are waking up and realizing that it's a much, much larger market in parallel with NVIDIA. We'll see what they say out Wednesday. But the opportunity set there is pretty expansive. We have some recent partnerships that have been announced, the particular Arm stands out. But everyone knows that we're in line with AMD. We have plenty of products with Intel and Arm and there's likely others in the pipeline from a development perspective. I would have to add that almost any silicon provider or a platform provider is coming to us to ask for assistance providing some form factor that it would be application optimized for that particular set. So the demand is just -- it's not a demand issue at all from our perspective.

Okay. Maybe let's talk about the industry discussion around CPUs and CPU-based servers seeing an inflection with agentic AI. I mean when I look at your revenue mix, 80% of the revenues you reported, I think, last quarter were driven by GPU platforms. How should we think about Super Micro's leverage to eventually, if we were to see an inflection in CPU or CPU compute TAM, how would Super Micro be positioned for that?

Well, I think, number one, we ground our position in the marketplace on a CPU-based architecture for quite some time. We were able to put more compute in the footprint at a lower power envelope, a better thermal envelope than anyone else at that time, as you know, enterprises didn't care. Operators don't care. There's different use cases and agentic AI. You think about the agent, and it's a serial process that will go back to the GPU itself and then does this thing. And so it's a serial process. We already have some outstanding systems, liquid cooled CPU systems that are available out in the marketplace. So we think it will be quite helpful because we'll be able to package the entirety of this together, whether there's the model portion and the inferencing portion or the agent CPU portion on top of just general purpose enterprise workloads. So this is a boon to the business and a boon to of the market opportunity.

But are you seeing any of that in your orders?

Yes.

Got it. Customer concentration. In fiscal 2Q, one customer, I think, was 63% of revenue. In fiscal 3Q, you had two customers, 1 27%, 20%. How are you thinking about diversifying the business longer term? And which are the most customer -- important customer verticals that you then need to pursue to deliver on customer diversification?

Yes. So the customer concentration element will be fairly easy to solve. We're already solving it today. We're solving it in a forward look, basically where -- we're designing systems for our customers that we know that will span out. We've already discussed the fact that we'd see customer diversification. We see product diversification. There'll probably be limited -- the pricing competition in those ancillary or CPU-based systems will be a little bit different.

In smaller sizes, you won't get the pricing power. So I'll just add another point with -- we have a large 63% customer that I think is now going to be a large customer for another private entity. And so there's -- the demand is pretty intriguing if you catch what I'm saying. It doesn't look like you're catching what I'm saying, but a whole entire data center just went to some. And so it kind of speaks to the volumes of what's going on and the opportunity set here. So as that expands out, we expect diversification to occur. That's the answer to the question. Diversification is going to occur. It's just when, right? The back half of the year, yes.

Okay. So Anthropic becomes a customer is what you're saying?

Somehow indirectly because it's going to lead to your potential next question.

Yes. Because this is one of the pushbacks that I see a lot from investors, which is NeoClouds are the driver of demand that you are seeing some of your competitors are seeing as well. But the argument that they sometimes make is that the durability of the demand is difficult to underwrite. How do you think about derisking when you are particularly taking in orders from NeoClouds, how are you looking at it from the aspect of derisking some of the demand or demand indications they're providing you?

So from a demand perspective and NeoClouds, it's quite -- I think it's quite evident to everyone that the NeoClouds are getting large contracts from the hyperscalers, and there's a dispersion of these workloads across the NeoCloud base that's fueling the NeoClouds and the advent of more and more, so on top of the -- some of the model builders expanding. So the NeoCloud as a class will get bigger. We're seeing that now. Sovereign is coming through, I wouldn't say pretty quickly, but they're also using the NeoClouds and the enterprises are starting to wake up.

So the productivity that can be obtained with these tools is significant, and the customers are seeing that. And so again, it kind of speaks back to the diversity of demand and the durability of demand. So I don't know if the -- what the numbers are, but of the amount of people that are using AI or to potentially could use AI is significantly small. The use cases are large. We can all pontificate of what that would look like, but I think it's going to be pretty impressive. And we're here to support all those different types of use cases and make the cost of tokenomics very optimal for our customers. And so we're moving at the speed we like to do that. And again, part of that portion here is system optimization on top of wrapping the solution around that, and that lowers tokenomics for our end customers. And so we're all in on that.

Got it. You did mention towards the end there that the enterprise is waking -- what are you seeing on that front? Is it starting to be material? Is it focused on certain use cases?

So I like the enterprise discussion because the intriguing part about it is the NeoClouds, I mean, the argument is, is CoreWeave an enterprise? I mean, I argue it's an enterprise, right? So from that perspective, the top tier of users in the global corporate base are enterprises, and they're all seeing the higher end -- the higher segment here or the more foot forward enterprises are signing contracts and moving forward, and we're seeing that through our customer base. But the block and tackle enterprise, that's going to buy a couple of servers on a yearly basis. We can still serve them, but we're pretty focused on the customers that are very technology focused that want to drive greater economics in their business. So there are plenty of those customers out there.

Good. You had certain challenges in your fiscal 3Q, there was customer readiness issue that pushed out some revenue into fiscal 4Q and potentially some beyond that, are you expecting to recover completely recover the revenues that were pushed out? And are you seeing as you engage with your customers, this becoming more of a systemic issue in terms of data center readiness that you might have to navigate going forward?

So readiness has been an issue for the past many quarters, right? And there's been some pushouts and movement around, as you know, to architect. Pretty easy to deliver a single server back in the good old days, right, but to deliver an entire data center or a data hall is a little bit of a different emotion and it takes a little bit more time planning.

So in some of these cases, the customer -- the power is not ready, whether it's the shell, whether it's power to the building, those types of things that have occurred. They're likely to occur in the future. We try to determine based upon what customer discussions are that when these things will be ready and the time and the window of shipments. The other factor would be a customer that was looking for revenue recognition on the verification of the system working, but the networking switches might not be on site, so you can't verify the system.

So from that perspective, those types of things have happened. We try to mitigate those. So it's one of the reasons why our guidance parameters are fairly -- I wouldn't say loose, but have a little bit of leeway to them. And typically, we've made up any -- all the pushouts in 1 or 2 quarters on a go-forward basis. So it's not perfect, but the growth rates that we're putting up are pretty material, and we're trying to match those or meet those.

Okay. Just a heads up, if anyone in the audience has a question, please feel free to raise your hand, and we'll get a mic over to you. But in the meantime, let me just continue to sort of go down this question that I have -- question list that I have.

Supply chain constraints. Clearly, that's becoming a bottleneck in a lot of the industry. what's your planning in terms of supply? And what are you doing in terms of either purchase commitments or inventory to be able to have supply assurance? And is it then easy or how are you finding it whether it's easy or tough to pass that higher input cost that you then pay to your customers?

Well, I think that prior to us reporting a recent quarter, people were pretty focused on the memory side of the house and to some extent, the CPU side of the house. And our margins kind of reflected that we didn't have an issue there. We tend to pass through costs and work around in any of those pricing challenges on a real-time basis, and we try to match them to order flow or forecast. So we've had a lot of experience in the supply chain management side. And we're just working through whatever shortages that we have. And in some cases, our customers are helpful in helping secure some of that supply depending on needs and requirements. So it's a challenge, and we're working through it, and so far hasn't really been a material headwind. A lot of work internally to make sure it is not, but, yes.

Any questions from the audience?

Just following on supply and memory. I think the follow-up would be a number of your customers are in a cohort that maybe have more leverage or not quite as much margin to take those price increases over time, especially if supply remains scarce. So just how do you think about that? And is there any risk that there might be friction to passing these price increases along going forward?

Do you want to restate the question?

Question is a lot of customers might not have the -- necessarily the leverage to take that price increase from you. So how does it impact demand?

Well, I think the cadence at the customer level has been that if they don't take the price today, it's going to be worse later. And so they're trying to work around it. So the behavior of the customer, the average customer, I would say, not scale customers is markedly different than what most investors are used to. So I think they're realizing that they have a need, they're going to have to pay for it, at least in the short term. So I think that's a pretty shocking statement of view that that's the case, but that's the behavior we're seeing.

Maybe moving to gross margins. Your execution in F 3Q on that front as well as the guidance for F4Q is much better than at least what the Street was thinking and we were thinking. How much of that is a structurally better execution towards margins or just one-off mix driven that these 2 quarters are a different mix than your usual quarter?

Well, recall that we were absorbing a 63% customer. So you can imagine pricing and et cetera, was a factor and the customer and product mix, what we were doing there had a little bit of a headwind. So I think the majority of the change was working off of that customer. Expedite fees and inventory charges and tariffs were lower in the quarter, and they were lesser of a factor.

As we move forward into the current quarter, the customer mix and product mix is generally where we're landing with the current margins. And so that's the driver there. And to be clear, the ultimate goal and the direction that we're heading in is to walk margins up. We're doing that on multiple arenas.

One, we have a broadening of the customer base. We have a broadening of the platform. So the pricing pressure on those platforms should be different because, quite frankly, there will be a few competitors that will be able to deliver some of the systems that we're going to be delivering to customers in bulk. And so that -- those things, those factors will be supportive of a double-digit gross margin element as we move forward.

Okay. Maybe just quantify that a bit more. When you say double-digit gross margin long term, is that different from the progress you used to have in the past about 14% to 17%?

So those numbers kind of pinned to traditional compute platform kind of numbers. And so the product set is materially different now. And if and when, as we do a mature DCBBS, those margins can be materially higher. If the platforming the different various platform providers expand and those use cases go up. We're absolutely 100% positioned to deliver to those customers' solutions set. So I don't want to put an upper bound on it, but there's a lot of possibility that the margin profile in a year out would be much different than what we've talking about today.

Got it. And as much as you said, the long-term margin target is double digit, how much of a discipline around what you do to pursue market share versus manage margins? Are we going to see more on a consistent basis? Because one would argue like having a concentrated customer with 63% of your revenue is probably more that you're trading off share, market share instead of taking margin, a better margin, right? So do we see that consistency come in? Or is it still going to be, okay, if there's a big customer on offer, we would rather go for that and focus the margin to be a more margin instead?

So as we all know, is a founder-led organization. He is customer first. So there could be opportunities that pop up that move the needle in either direction from a customer perspective. So what I'm trying to say is we may not walk away from something fairly large if we're able to do it. But we did call out or he did call out that we're focused on a balance of revenue growth and margins. So we'll see. It remains to be seen. But I think the trajectory is the double digits and supporting the customers, realizing the customer base is going to be expanding, the product set is going to be expanding, won't be reliant on one particular build that could have a material impact to the numbers.

Okay. Moving to operating expenses. You had high 20% year-over-year growth in F 3Q. Guidance for F4Q implies further acceleration relative to that. What are you spending on? Where are you directing these OpEx investments towards?

I mean I think the operating expenses is for scaling the business and we haven't made any significant outsized investments on a relative basis. So I don't think there's anything major to call out there. We've been very lean or maybe slightly too lean and pretty focused on not having any outsized purchases in the mix. So I think continue to be pretty focused on controlling operating expenses as we move forward.

I mean is part of the operating expense increase related to DCBBS? Because you mentioned DCBBS is a better margin, but is it a better margin on the operating margin profile as well once you include hiring cost?

It would be implied that it would be, and we may give more color at the year-end when we provide guidance for fiscal '27.

Okay. Good. Maybe just on the corporate side, can you provide us an update on the internal investigations related to some of your employees being involved in selling unauthorized compute to China? Do you expect any financial restatements due to those investigations?

I think we were pretty clear on telling the market that if you read the indictment, that we're not the target. We separated those involved quite quickly. The Board acted quickly, set up a special -- the results have not yet come in from that perspective. We recently filed our Q. So from our view of the incident where there was a falsification of documentation at almost every level -- at every level and even to the federal level, that's an outside very extreme case.

And the company is moving forward and serving customers and shipping systems and engaging in new builds. So when there's more details, if there are more details, we'll make them known. But just very fresh situation and we're fortunate again, we were not indicted, and we did not know about the situation until the indictment dropped.

Okay.

Hang a second. And we stated that we expect that there will be no restatement. Obviously, with filing Q is a pretty good indication there.

Maybe a couple more. At the end of 3Q, your total debt was $8.8 billion, cash balance of $1.3 billion, which to us looked like it's the lowest since you've had for a while. How do you then address your working capital requirements with that level of cash balance? And can you continue to support robust growth with that level of cash?

Yes. So we did call out that in the quarter that we had anticipated some payments in the quarter that kind of were pushed out into the April quarter. And so that was, I think, $2.7 billion. So we executed $12.6 billion and change in revenues in the prior quarter with a $4 billion ending cash balance.

So you kind of get the sense that those levels should be fine in the zone where we guided to this quarter. So from that perspective, the other element to this is as the customer base broadens out and the deal sizes are a little bit more manageable bites, the turns will be quicker. So there'll be less of a stress on working capital. But swallowing a 63% customer in a period has some ripple effects, and we're going to get past those shortly.

Got it. And last one, have you seen any recent change in credit terms from your suppliers just given the investigation, what's been going on? Have you seen suppliers change at all?

So we're fully engaged with all of our suppliers. And I would say we tend not to discuss those types of things and disclose those. So -- but we're fully engaged with them in helping them bring their products to market.

Okay. Great. I'll wrap it up there. Thank you. Thanks for coming to the conference. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Christa, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Super Micro Computer, Inc. Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call.

With us today are Charles Liang, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer; David Weigand, Chief Financial Officer; and Michael pager, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Staiger, Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending Super Micro's call to discuss financial results for third quarter fiscal 2026, which ended March 31, 2026. As you know, with me today are Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman and Executive Officer; David Weigand, Chief Financial Officer.

By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website. As a reminder, during today's call, the company will refer to a presentation that is available to participants in the Investor Relations section of the company's website under the Events and Presentations tab. We've also published management's scripted commentary on our website.

Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, capital allocation, future business outlook, including guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026 and the full fiscal year 2026.

These statements and other comments are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or even events to materially differ from those anticipated, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. You can learn more about these risks and uncertainties in the press release we issued earlier today, our most recent 10-K filing for fiscal '25 and other SEC filings. All of these documents are available on the IR page of Super Micro's website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Most of today's presentation will refer to non-GAAP financial results and business outlook.

For an explanation of our non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the company's presentation or to our press release published earlier today. The non-GAAP measures are presented as we believe that they provide investors with the means of evaluating and understanding how management evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as a substitute for or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. In addition, a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is contained in today's press release and in the supplemental information attached to today's presentation.

At the end of today's prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session for sell-side analysts. For fourth quarter fiscal 2026 quiet period begins at the close of business, Friday, June 12, 2026. And for now, I will turn the call over to Charles.

Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining today's call. We had a significant business value growth with our technology leadership and market expansion. However, before I discuss the specifics of the quarter, I want to provide an update on the recent development regarding the entailment of certain individuals formerly associated with the company. I must be clear, Super Micro is not a defendant, not a target or a grand jury investigation and Super Micro has a tolerance to any employee who violate -- law and regulation.

I am personally shocked and sentenced by this logic actions, which, in Norway represented the value or as of this company. We took immediate action by terminating our relationship with the defendant and are helping and cover in -- with the U.S. government. Additionally, our independent directors have launched a thorough independent investigation with up forensic and legal forms to ensure we continue to maintain the highest standard of integrity. We are not waiting for this process to finish.

We have further strengthened our global trade compliance program under actor leadership. Not only is the Super Micro -- committed to protecting advanced medical technology and following the highest and business standard, but continue to expand our manufacturing -- right here in United States. Again, the allergic actions or few individuals do not define us. Our focus remains on doing extraordinary work for our customer and partner and media industry with transparency and access.

Now let's talk about -- this was a quarter defined by value and focus for Super Micro. Despite the industry-wide shortage of key components, including CPU, GPU and memory. Our business continues to grow and expand. Indeed, our back order is now in another record high. We advanced and optimized our older data center infrastructure using our leading direct cooling ELC technology. Our focus remains on delivering the fastest time to online PTO in the industry, ensuring our customers can scale their AI factories quickly and most efficient. While our fiscal Q3 revenue of $10.2 billion was impacted by customer site readiness delay, our business on the rentals are stronger than ever.

This is purely a short-term delay. Several customers side will not yet equip with the power and -- required for their -- cloud deployment. And we expect to capture this revenue in the coming quarters. One of the most significant achievements this quarter was our gross margin recovery. which increased significantly to 10.1% non-GAAP, representing a 58% improvement over the 6.4% non-GAAP reported in the previous quarter. We are committed to achieving a sustainable double-digit gross margin model by increasing our focus on enterprise market and our DC BBS business.

Here are some key growth drivers. First, market share, business remains very strong. in the near cloud, solving AI and agent AI segment. We have been aggressively fostering the traditional enterprise and storage business for about 1 year. And we start to see strong growth.

Growing opportunities. Our data center building broad solution, DC BBS continue to attract old and new customers' interest and create new profit streams. By offering a total data center solution that includes complete liquid-cooling facility, management software, networking and service, we are providing much more value to our customers. as they're committed to our total solutions. Total mix and efficiency. We improved our product mix with some more unique value product in this quarter and thereafter. We also advanced our design of manufacturing, and more automation in our factories to build products faster with higher rate and quality and supply chain. We successfully managed inventory through a dynamic supply environment and took actions to reduce tariff-related cost operation. These efforts have improved our flexibility, on tax margin and support customer delivery time line.

Here is the bigger story. Super Micro is developing from a U.S.-based server designer and manufacturer into a total data center solution provider. We expand our business to help customer planning, building, deployed and servicing data center infrastructure for global enterprise and new cloud provider, especially. Our BC PPS business is central to this transformation, providing almost everything a customer needs to build an AI factory, including cooling units, networking, power sale, battery backup, management software and many other data center subsystems. Our DC BBS business continues to grow exactly as what we play, showing a consistent and accelerating contribution to our top line and bottom line quarter-over-quarter. And I believe our DC BBS welcome contributed more than 25% of our total profit in the coming few years as an IT technology leader for more than 30 years, we have consistently turned industry disruption into innovation and new strong opportunities, one of the key value and drivers of our DC BBS business. is our data center and management software. We see significant demand for the Super Micro data center and cloud software suite, including our super cloud composer that manage tens of thousands of systems or rec in real time. It provides comprehensive control over system and right label, power usage, cooling status, safety conditions and device utilization alongside many other clinical features.

Our management software feature also include advanced CPU and GPU -- which is a critical function for today's AI data center. The revenue from this new software -- is finally growing at a tremendous pace, increasing from less than $10 million per quarter, just a few quarters ago to $34 million last quarter and more than $46 million book for this quarter. By bundling subscription-based software and services alongside our hardware, we are strengthening our customer relationships and improving our long-term profitability. We expect BC PBS including software and service to continue its rapid growth and to become a major part of our key value medicine. We continue to grow and expand our partnership with many key suppliers, especially with NVIDIA, we are currently shipping many skill over their piece, rack scale systems, including GB300 NVL72, [ P300GXSKU, B21MV04 ] and influencing application optimized RPS product lines, and we are preparing to be among the first to market with the new variables systems. Including an [ MVA 72 ] Supercluster.

We continue to build on strong momentum of our AMB [ MIC50 ] platform. as we prepare for the next generation of AMD TD solutions, featuring APAC business and MI 400 series of products. In addition, we are working closely with Intel and up on the development of upcoming GM 6 plus platforms and a new addition to our portfolio including AGI GPU-based solutions. This system will deliver exceptional performance per watt. Specifically optimized for our growing demand of agentic AI workloads.

By leveraging Super Micro system building product solution, and data center scale within broad -- we can efficiently support a wide variety of compute platform and optimize them for different business verticals.

Moving on to our footprint. We are expanding our global production capacity with new facility to better support AI demand across the world. Our side in Taiwan, Malaysia and Netherlands, are all ramping up aggressively. Domestically, we recently announced our largest U.S. site to date. A new DC BBS campus in Silicon Valley, that's one mile away from our headquarters. This brings our total Bay Area footprint to nearly 4 million square feet, featuring a new buildings optimized for innovation behind production, and -- or a next-generation end-to-end data center total solutions. Within this new campus, we are building multiple large-scale validation and production facilities.

Some of them, including a cleanroom specifically to support our new DLC 2 subsystem and next-generation networking solutions, including advanced optical photonics-based device. With these expansions. We are on track to produce more than 6,000 or awarded the most powerful state-of-the-art rig for...

In closing, Super Micro continued to scale our revenue and scale up value. We have strengthened our governance, delivering a meaningful margin recovery. and expanded DC BBS growing in both volume and value through software networking, service and more. Our leadership in LLC technology pay our ability to deliver rescale total solution at the industry's fastest time to online will continue to fuel our strong growth. Keeping Super Micro at a center for our AI revolution.

With that, I remain very bullish about our growth in the AI and data center market. For the first quarter, we target $12 billion, given stable supply conditions. For the full year, we target $40 billion.

I will turn this over to David.

Thank you, Charles. Fiscal Q3 FY '26 revenue was $10.2 billion, up 123% year-over-year and down 19% quarter-over-quarter. As Charles mentioned, Q3 revenue was impacted by data center and customer readiness together with industry-wide supply chain constraints. We expect to recognize the deferred revenue in the upcoming quarters. Orders and backlog remain strong across our customer base driven by AI infrastructure demand with AI GPU-related platforms contributing over 80% of revenue.

During Q3, the enterprise channel revenue totaled $0.8 billion representing about 28% of revenue versus 15% in the prior quarter. This was up 46% year-over-year and up 45% quarter-over-quarter. The OEM appliance and large data center segment revenue was $7.4 billion, representing approximately 72% of Q3 revenue versus 85% in the last quarter. This was up 183% year-over-year and down 31% quarter-over-quarter.

For Q3 FY '26, we had 2 existing customers, each representing more than 10% of revenues, 1 large data center customer at 27% of revenues and 1 enterprise customer at 10% of revenues. By geography, the U.S. represented 69% of Q3 revenue, Asia 13%, Europe, 7%; and Rest of World, 11%. On a year-over-year basis, U.S. revenue increased 154%. Asia grew 1%, Europe grew 146% and the Rest of World increased nearly 500%. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, U.S. revenue decreased 36%. Asia increased 17%, Europe increased 105% and the rest of the world increased 392%.

The Q3 non-GAAP gross margin was 10.1%, up from 6.4% in Q2. Gross margins were ahead of expectations driven by our customer and product mix, together with lower tariffs, expedite and inventory reserve charges. Q3 GAAP operating expenses were $393 million which was up 34% year-over-year and up 21% quarter-over-quarter.

On a non-GAAP basis, operating expenses were $278 million, up 29% year-over-year and up 16% quarter-over-quarter. Both GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses were up quarter-over-quarter due to higher headcount-related expenses. Non-GAAP operating margin was -- for Q3 was 7.3% compared to 4.5% in Q2. Other income and expense for Q3 totaled a net expense of [ $3 million ], reflecting $49 million in interest and other income, offset by $64 million and interest expense related to convertible notes and the revolving credit facilities.

The tax provision for Q3 was $127 million on a GAAP basis and $156 million on a non-GAAP basis resulting in a GAAP tax rate of 20.8% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 21.1%. The Q3 GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.72 and compared to guidance of at least 2% $0.52, and non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.84 versus guidance of at least $0.60 due to higher gross margins. The GAAP fully diluted share count decreased sequentially from $694 million in Q2 to $692 million in while the non-GAAP share count was largely flat at $709 million in Q3 compared to Q2.

Cash flow used in operations for Q3 was $6.6 billion compared to $24 million used in the prior quarter. Operating cash flow was impacted by a reduction of $10 billion in accounts payable and by an increase in inventory of $581 million. These factors were only partially offset by higher net income and a reduction of $2.6 billion in accounts receivable.

The Q3 closing inventory was $11.1 billion, up from $10.6 billion in Q2. CapEx for Q3 totaled $80 million, resulting in negative free cash flow of $6.7 billion for the quarter. At quarter end, our cash position totaled $1.3 billion. Furthermore, $2.7 billion of accounts receivable collections expected in March were received in early April. Our bank and convertible note debt was $8.8 billion, resulting in a net debt position of $7.5 billion compared to a net debt position of $787 million in the prior quarter. In addition to using our existing U.S. revolving credit facility and nonrecourse AR sale facility, we set up and commenced usage of a $1.8 billion revolving credit facility to further support working capital requirements.

Turning to the balance sheet and working capital metrics. The cash conversion cycle increased from 54 days in Q2 and to 106 days in Q3. Days of inventory increased by 43 days to 106 days versus 63 days in the prior quarter. Days sales outstanding increased by 36% to 85 days versus 49 days in Q2, while days payables outstanding increased by 27 days to 85 days versus 58 days in Q2.

Now turning to the outlook for Q4 fiscal year '26, which ends June 30, 2026, we expect net sales in the range of $11 billion to $12.5 billion. We expect GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.53 to $0.67 and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.65 to $0.79. We expect gross margins to be in the range of 8.2% to 8.4% based on expected customer mix. GAAP operating expenses are expected to be around $433 million which include approximately $114 million in stock-based compensation expenses that are excluded from non-GAAP operating expenses.

The outlook for Q4 of fiscal year 2026 fully diluted GAAP earnings per share includes approximately $95 million in expected stock-based compensation expenses net of tax effects of $30 million, which are excluded from non-GAAP diluted net income per common share. We expect other income and expenses, including interest expense, to result in a net expense of approximately $36 million. The company's projections for Q4 fiscal year '26 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted net income per common share assume a GAAP tax rate of 19.4%, a non-GAAP tax rate of 20.4% and a fully diluted share count of 695 million shares for GAAP and 712 million shares for non-GAAP. Capital expenditures for Q4 are expected to be in the range of $30 million to $50 million. For the full fiscal year 2026, we expect net sales to be in the range of $38.9 billion to $40.4 billion.

Michael, we're now ready for Q&A.

Great. Before we begin Q&A, I just like to remind everyone that the purpose of this call is to discuss our third quarter fiscal '26 financial results. As such, we ask that you focus your questions on the results we announced today. Thank you in advance. And Christa, let's begin.

[Operator Instructions]. And your first question comes from Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital.

And congrats on the progress with the gross margin. It's great to see that. Yes, a couple if I could. I guess the first one would be guess on some of the stuff that's been sort of a press release by you guys throughout sort of during the quarter. I guess, specifically, could you give us an update on the indictment. Any more insight any company employee involvement? Do you think you'll have to restate earnings. Are you -- back to file with your 10-Q things like that? And then I guess, part and parcel with that, on the Board investigation that you guys announced, if you could talk to the opportunity that, that could have to strengthen the organization sort of and what those opportunities might be, that would be awesome. And then I have a quick follow-up.

Okay. Thanks, Anand. So the company was surprised and disappointed to learn of the alleged diversion to China of certain of our products. As we've previously announced, we're taking this matter seriously. The alleged conduct would violate our export control policies and procedures, and we're fully cooperating with the U.S. government to address this situation.

In addition, our independent directors have retained an outside law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson and a forensic firm, Alex Partners, to conduct an independent investigation into these events. The investigations are ongoing, and we can't give you any final information at this time. So based on what we know so far, though, that could change as the investigation progresses.

No one from the company, other than those named in the DOJ inditement was involved. As to your second question on restatement of earnings, based on everything we know at this moment and considering the independent investigation is ongoing, we do not believe we will need to restate. And lastly, on the 10-Q, again, the investigation is ongoing, and any filing will be subject to BDO review. But based on what we know at this moment, we are planning to file our 10-Q and are preparing accordingly. And I think your last comment about certainly, we will be taking to heart the results of the independent investigation and we will look at that as an opportunity to grow and strengthen.

And I guess my follow-up would be sort of dovetailing off of that, you guys are probably aware sort of One of the top questions on investors' mind is in to these sort of aforementioned dynamics, is there potential for customers to get a little skittish and move away to other server vendors, gen AI server vendors. So to the degree that you have any context that you could offer there, that would be greatly appreciated. And that's it for me.

Thank you for the question. Indeed, we are growing our customer base, like last few quarters last year. Now we have many more large customers and -- customer. And from our experience, work with customers, communicate with customers, most of the customers either feel pretty solid to continue our business and continue to grow together. So at this moment, I personally don't feel negative feeling.

Your next question comes from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.

This is MT on behalf of Samik Chatterjee. For my first one, I just wanted to ask in your last call, you mentioned DC BBS contributions to profits during first half of about 4%. Can you please update how did it track during the quarter? And how much of a driver was that relative to gross margin improvement that you saw during the quarter? And I have a follow-up.

Yes, very good question. Yes, our DC BBS indeed continue to gain more and more attraction from our old customers and new customers. So it's a very good value add to our hardware and also enhancing our relationship with the customer. So the customers who use our DC BBS continue to grow. And we believe this growth will continue strongly in next 2 years, I personally expect at least 20% of our net -- from DC BBS, including the management software.

Okay. And then for my follow-up, I just wanted to ask on capacity additions, which you've done during the quarter. Can you please help us quantify the revenue capacity that it helped to add for the company?

Yes. Also a very good question. Again, our capacity now is very huge, but we continue to grow our capacity because we like to make sure our sales -- for a new generation of data center need for the industry. For example, a much higher density in power and computing density and also in photonics technology and a new generation of Switch. So we are preparing all of that. And some of the new facility in the was paired with clean. So to make sure we are able to buy the ejective base deep cooling the best communication bandwidth and minimize the cloud consumption for the new generation data center needs. So although our capacity is very big, but we continue to build more clarity. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Victor Kuo with Raymond James.

I just wanted to follow up on the first question that was asked. Does the investigation around the -- that may potentially impact your relationship with NVIDIA subsequently your allocation or supply of GPU and other components because I think that's another really frequent point of concern that we get from clients these days is how that impacts your relationship and whether or not that's the dynamic there has changed at all?

Our relationship with vendor have been very long time, right, including NVIDIA, AMD, NPL program. So at the least moment, we feel our partnership stay strong and even not stronger -- are strong as before, and we continue to work together for a lot of new projects. So we also share with our vendor is some a few employees individual case. So I hope there are no impact basically. David, do you want to add something to that?

Yes. I mean our understanding is that there has been no change in allocation.

Great. That's very helpful. And just a quick follow-up. The investments that you previously noted that you made in engineering support services. Have those mostly kind of peaked now? And is that contributing to the margin advent at this point?

I'm sorry, could you repeat that?

The investments that you've noted previously regarding Engineered Support Services, have those kind of peaked now at this point? Or I guess, where are we along progress on those investments? And how has that contributed to the margin dynamics going forward?

Yes. I mean, a very good question. Indeed, our service business including data center planning, designing or deploying the buildup services continue to grow. So we continue to grow that service team, consulting team and revenue continue to grow Yes, in this segment, the profit is much better than our average hardware for sure.

Yes. But I would say, in no ways has peaked to it's really -- we're just gaining traction.

Your next question comes from the line of Asiya Merchant with Citi.

If I could on just the supply constraints, there's been a lot of talk about CPU-based shortages. So just the guide that you're providing, are you constrained in any components here. And would there be a number if the supply issues were resolved, basically, were you constrained by supply. And then if I can squeeze in one more as well on the data center. Clearly, you're seeing traction here relative to where you were last quarter when it was just starting to kick through. Can you help us understand what kind of customers if you're seeing any change in the customers, whether it's from a vertical perspective or a geography perspective where you're seeing traction with these data center building block solutions.

Yes. Thank you. Yes, in terms of shortage, I believe it's a global common program. So in last 6 months, as you know, on the memory price grow so much double, cheaper, more than triple and CPU shortage, especially from Intel. And also in some GPU shortage, right? So we like other competitors, other system companies, yes, we suffer a lot from those shortage. And those shortages may continue for -- we don't know how long -- memory and SSD, but we have a very good relationship with our vendors. So we continue to work with them and try to gain more long-term so -- as to our customer base, yes, as we shared last time, we start to gain more minimum enterprise customer globally and neo cloud. So we add more large customers, and we add a lot of midsized and small size customers, and we will continue in this direction to support more.

Your next question comes from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs.

I was wondering if there was any onetime items that impacted gross margins in the quarter. And anything you could share there specifically to quantify? I think you mentioned tariffs, expedite fees and then inventory reserve charges, that would be helpful. And then I have follow-up.

Sure. So with the tariffs, as you know, were reduced by the Supreme Court. And there were some replacement tariffs that came in. So we are hopeful that tariffs will be down net on a net basis going forward. So whether I look at that as a temporary or ongoing thing is based on optimism. But the other thing regarding expedite fees, we had a very large deployment in our March quarter which -- I'm sorry, in our December quarter, which ended up incurring a lot of expedite charges. So we -- those did not recur in the March quarter.

So therefore, we expect that to be incrementally up going forward as to the supply constraints, as Charles mentioned, we're -- it was especially troublesome in the last 6 months. but we expect some challenge going forward, but not like we incurred over the last 6 months.

That was very helpful. And then in terms of just thinking about the revenue miss in the quarter being related to a delivery that was delayed because of customer readiness and that deal was contemplated in your prior guidance for a margin benefit that was modest quarter-over-quarter. Was that deal that slipped or was otherwise delayed drag on consolidated gross margins? And how should we think about the impact to margins as the revenue from that deal that's recognized in the coming quarters here?

Yes. So we think that some of the some of the large deals that we talked about in the past have been incrementally beneficial to Super Micro because of our reputation, the reputation that it brings for us in deploying large-scale installations to some of the best sites in the world. And so what we've noticed now is that we're -- as Charles mentioned, we're not only getting more -- larger engagements, which gives us a diversified customer base, but we're also getting better margins from those sales. And so we're actually we actually had more diversification this quarter, and we see that going into the current -- into the June quarter as well. So we think on a net basis, some of the strategic decisions that we made on large installations have been beneficial.

Your next question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

I've got 2. The first one is a clarification on revenues and gross margins. David, you mentioned that there was some shareholder revenue into future quarters. Can you help us quantify how much of that is coming back in, in December quarter versus how much would be in future quarters? And on the margin side, can you help us clarify how you're thinking about the margin decline from fiscal 3Q to fiscal 4Q. I think you guided 8.3% gross margin on higher $11.8 billion of revenue. So what are some of the factors impacting gross margins between fiscal 3Q and 4Q? And I have a follow-up.

Sure. So regarding the deferred revenue, it really comes down to when the customers are ready and when their data centers are -- so we're all optimistic that we can ship right away. But that sometimes depends on the customer readiness. So we have to wait and see if -- how much lands in the June quarter and how much lands in the September quarter. As to margins, the -- our margin mix is determined by which customers that we sell to and which products we sell. So that's really the biggest dynamic in affecting our margins. But what we -- so therefore, what we see is a good upward trend to that 8.2% to 8.4% range, but it will depend on which customers ultimately we sell to.

Got it. Can I ask a follow-up on working capital. In the past, when we've had GPU transitions, you had to spend some working capital and time and money as customers qualify these new racks. So I'm thinking as NVIDIA releases new GPUs and when the transition happens from the overall rack to new cyber rack. Do you -- how are you thinking about your working capital needs? And is there a chance that you might have to come to the capital markets again to raise capital for working capital. So just your -- on investments required as new GPUs and renew rag designs come out?

Yes. Very good question. Basically, we are diversifying our customer base and also improving our total value. Now we have more and more partnership that we not just build AI server not just storage, but we have customer deployment and build a whole data center with total solution. So indeed, our business will be more diversified and more kind of smooth slides in terms of revenue dynamic and also profit margin change. So in terms of those concerns, we are improving in a very positive direction now quarter-over-quarter basically.

Okay. And in terms of working capital, David, any thoughts there?

Yes. So Ruplu, what I would say is I always hope that we need to go back to the markets for more money...

Because we grow a lot. But if we grow more stably, [indiscernible], so it depends.

It depends on how fast our growth rate is Ruplu.

Yes, we try to double again revenue, then we may need some more have in terms of capital. But if we grow a little bit humble, then I believe we are pretty enough because now our business model is improving.

Your next question comes from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

And congratulations on the strong gross margin. Charles, you mentioned that over the next 2 years, targeting 20% the data center building box solution was 20%. Was that gross profit? Or was that revenue?

Profit.

Got it. Okay. Very good. And can remember David or Charles, you gave a percentage or a dollar number of DC BBS in the quarter to quarter ago period, can you just read that again quickly?

We didn't give that percentage out, Nehal. But our gross margin did increase on our data center sales, but I don't have the percentage of our gross profit that, that reposted.

Yes. When the DC BBS percentage continue to grow, we remain quickly provide that kind of percentage change.

Okay. And so thinking about the significant improvement in gross margin, would you bucket that more towards DC BBS ramp or more towards a reduction in your 10% customer going from 63% to 27% in that -- from the December to March quarter?

Yes. I guess there are 2 factors. We will continue to improve our gross margin. One is DC BBS solution. With that segment, our profit margin did most of our time more than 20%. And the other segment is enterprise customer focus we start to grow minimal enterprise customer, and we will continue that direction. So that will improve our gross margin and net margin as well.

Okay. And then included in the guidance is the expectation that this customer does 27% of revenue in the current quarter will continue to be a 10-plus percent customer.

Yes, we will have a minimal new cloud kind of mid-sized cloud customers and -- side customers. And for sure, we will continue to support our large cloud customers as well, but more new cloud, small cloud enterprise cloud. So overall, our margin will continue to improve.

Your next question comes from the -- Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company.

This is Neil Young on for Quinn Bolton. So I was hoping you could touch on maybe what to you did a little bit, but maybe touch on what drove the strong over quarter increase in enterprise -- and then are you expecting to see healthy growth from enterprise again during the next quarter and through fiscal year '27? Or should we think about the revenue split by channel more closely reflected in 2Q? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. We don't provide the detail, but the direction is there very strongly. I mean, improve minimal enterprise customers, and we see a lot of customers really like to work with us. And then at the same time, DC BBS have us to engage with more and more new cloud and enterprise AI data center customer. So long term, we feel pretty comfortable in this direction.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just wanted to go back to gross margin one last time. Can you help us think about sort of what level is sustainable as we do look into fiscal year '27 as -- it seems like large AI deployments will most likely trend towards being a bigger mix of revenue in the coming quarters.

Yes. We believe we will continue to grow in a very healthy way because we are growing customer base, we are growing product line. We are growing total solutions, including software and service -- so we are getting to a much mature much high-value partner to the market.

Your next question comes from the line of John Tanwanteng with CJS Securities.

Really nice quarter. I was wondering if you could just address a little bit more on the export violation issue and if that might impact your ability to finance growth or the cost of finance growth going forward? And I don't know if you talked about the cost of remediation or addressing the violations, presenting them from happening again. But if you could help disclose that, that would be helpful as well.

Yes, John, I think I'll go back to the comments that I made earlier that we -- the company was not named in this. And so therefore, we take these things very seriously. But we -- and we're conducting our own internal investigation, as you know, and I don't want to add any more to that.

And also kind of based on what we know so far. -- though that could be actually as the investigation business, no one from the company other than those names in the -- environment was involved. So we have a very good confidence with our integrity.

Perfect. And then I have a follow-up, if I could. You mentioned record backlog and strong orders. And I was wondering what that indicates heading into the back half of this calendar year. just from a growth perspective, number one, and number two, if the supply environment can support growth over the first half.

Yes. Basically, we are a fast-growing company, as you know. So we can grow much faster, we accept lower margin business. So we try to be balanced in between the growth and the gross margin and net margin. So basically, we are in good shape. I would like to say, we can control and decide the ratio of the balance.

Your final question comes from the line of Mark Newman with Bernstein.

Congrats on the gross margin. On the gross margin and the mix, it sounds like that's the gross margin rebound driven partly by some of these which expedition charges reducing, but also it sounds like if I get it right, the enterprise mix is also helping. I wanted to ask just to clarify if that's right. And within enterprise, is that AI server? Or is this more a traditional server. I have another question also on the revenue as well.

Indeed, both. Kind of for AI, enterprise, I mean a lot of genetic AI kind of inflating application. So we see a very strong plan there. And for traditional server and storage, even IoT, we also start to greatly support and expand this market, and we see a very good progress. So we'll continue overall enterprise business.

Okay. Great. And then on the revenue, it sounds like the reason for the slightly light revenue was this 63% customer last quarter. now pushed out a little bit, which is, I believe, the 27% customer. As that customer comes back, presumably at that customer rebounds a little bit because of some of that revenue being pushed out is not going to be a bit of a drag down on the margins in the coming quarters? And sorry, just one more quick question. You mentioned record backlog. Any clarity on that? I didn't hear any actual number on what the backlog is and how that's changed over time.

Yes. So we don't give out our backlog number. So the -- we just make general comments about the fact that it's very strong. But we are -- as I mentioned earlier, we've diversified our pipeline extensively. And so we have -- as Charles mentioned, we have a number of large deals from new neo clouds and cloud service providers, which we are expecting to increase both our footprint, our customer diversity as well as our margins, along with our DC BBS and enterprise expansion.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you all for your participation, and you may now disconnect.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Matt, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Super Micro Computer, Inc. Q2 Fiscal Year '26 Financial Results Call. With us today are Charles Liang, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer; David Weigand, CFO; and Michael Staiger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. [Operator Instructions] Over to you, Michael.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for attending Super Micro's call to discuss financial results for the second quarter and full year fiscal 2026, which ended December 31, 2025. With me today, as you know, is Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer; and David Weigand, Chief Financial Officer.

By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website. As a reminder, during today's call, the company will refer to a presentation that is available to participants in the IR section of the company's website under Events and Presentations tab. We've also published management scripted commentary on our website.

Please note that some of the information you'll hear during the discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including guidance for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 and full fiscal year 2026. These statements and other comments are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. You can learn more about these risks and uncertainties in the press release we issued earlier this afternoon, our most recent 10-K filing for fiscal 2025 and other SEC filings.

All these documents are available on the IR page of Super Micro's website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Most of today's presentation will refer to non-GAAP financial results and business outlook. For an explanation of our non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to accompanying presentation or to our press release published earlier today. The non-GAAP measures are presented as we believe that they provide investors with the means of evaluating and understanding the companies management -- management evaluates the company's operating performance.

These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. In addition, a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is contained in today's press release and in the supplemental information attached to today's presentation. At the end of today's prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session for sell-side analysts. Our third quarter fiscal 2026 quiet period ends at the close -- or begins at the close of business Friday, March 13, 2026.

And for now, I will turn the call over to Charles.

Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining today's call. Super Micro delivered a strong fiscal Q2 as AI infrastructure demand continues to accelerate across every major customer segment. For the quarter, we achieved a record TWD $12.68 billion in revenue, including $1.5 billion before the former type of account last quarter, representing 123% year-over-year growth. This strong performance reflects the sustained momentum of our AI solutions and Rack Scale Systems as customers build out next-generation AI factories.

Super Micro has been developing some of the largest and most complex AI cluster ever built, highlighting our unmatched capability in large-scale manufacturing on-site deployment and integration. Most notably, our data center building block solution or DCBBS has started to gain some key customers' preference as they look for quicker time-to-deployment, TTD and quicker time-to-online TTO. This predesign, prevalidate infrastructure building blocks, not only speed up customers' data center builds, but they also save cost with better workload optimization and with minimal power and water consumption.

DCBBS will significantly help us gain market share in large, medium and small AI infrastructure deployments. With GP300 [indiscernible] platforms, we are also preparing for upcoming NVIDIA, Vera Rubin and AMD Helios solutions for the second half this year. While we continuously growing AI factory build-out customer and product mix are shifting -- shift more to large model builder who had pricing leverage pressuring gross margin. In Q2, especially the expedite transportation costs ongoing component shortage and their volatile pricing among with tariffs and impact our short-term gross margin.

As such, I would like to take a moment to highlight our key strategies to address this and efficiently strengthen our long-term profitability. First and foremost, Super Micro undergoes its fourth phase of product evolution with DCBBS as its key focus. As these data center [ deploy ] scale, DCBBS is and will become an increasingly important part of our value. In the first half of fiscal year '26, DCBBS solutions accounted for 4% of our profit. We expect this part of our profit to grow and meaningfully contribute to the second half of fiscal '26, and we see that growth accelerate to at least double-digit contribution by end of calendar 2026 [indiscernible] GPU, CPU life cycle. DCBBS becomes critical helpful to the value of our server and storage products by enhancing the data center infrastructure time to delivery and time to online, reducing power and water consumption and cost efficiently simplifying data center management and maintenance.

In just about 1 year, our DCBBS product lines grew from more than -- grew to more than 10 key subsystems, including CDU, [ LR2A ] heat exchanger, chilled doors, power shelves, battery backup, water tower, dry-towers, high-speed switching, data center management software and service. We are expanding this product line to include more new category such as transformer, next-generation power generators, device for energy backup and grid power replacement, further strengthening customer value, accelerating deployment and supporting long-term profit margin improving for Super Micro.

Other than developing DCBBS for better value and portability, we are also sharpening our focus on traditional enterprise, cloud and edge IoT customers to further diversify revenue with higher margin. In addition, we have introduced our X14 and H14 [indiscernible] solutions, featuring preconfigured systems that ship directly from our factory, enabling rapid deployment, optimized for specific AI cloud storage and telco edge workloads. These servers are ready to power immediately and reinforce Super Micro's core value time-to-market advantage for enterprise customer, channel partner and SMB end users.

We are also driving meaningful cost improvement through enhanced design for manufacturing, DFM and quality-driven engineering. We have introduced more modularized subsystem and expanded automation across our facilities. These efforts increase yield rate, reduce the work and enable us to bring new platform to volume production even faster and with higher quality. As product cycle shorten and technical complexity increase, these design for manufacturing advancement are essential for scale, efficiency and long-term margin improvement.

While executing these DFM initiatives, we are also continuing to expand our global manufacturing footprint aggressively and strategically. Our Silicon Valley facility remains the cornerstone of our U.S. operation, delivering faster time to market, strong security and higher quality integration. Internationally, new production site in Taiwan, Malaysia and Netherlands and so the Middle East are ramping to increase capacity support regional solving AI requirement and most importantly, optimize our overall cost structure.

In summary, as the only company with more than 32 years of robust server and storage focus, Super Micro is quickly evolving into a leading AI platform and data center infrastructure total solution provider. Strong Q2 performance, rapid expansion of DCBBS product line, deeper and more customer engagement and the global capacity investment position us well for long-term growth, while near-term margin pressure from customer mix, tariff, international facility expansion and key component shortage like memory and storage shortage. Our focus on enterprise business design for manufacturing improvement and the faster-growing DCBBS portfolio all help us gain new customers, support higher growth and net margin going forward.

Lastly, based on our broad customer back order forecast and commitment, we believe demand for AI and IT infrastructure remain unprecedentedly strong. Our DCBBS solution is exactly what customers need to build out their AI and cloud much faster, greener and lower total cost. With that in mind, I'm confident to guide at least $12.3 billion for Q3 and up our full year revenue guidance back to at least $40 billion. I look forward to sharing our progress with you next quarter. Thank you. Now I will turn it over to David.

Thank you, Charles. We achieved record Q2 fiscal year '26 revenue of $12.7 billion, up 123% year-over-year and up 153% quarter-over-quarter compared to our guidance of $10 billion to $11 billion. Q2 revenue included approximately $1.5 billion in delayed Q1 shipments due to customer readiness. Growth was driven this quarter by the rapid ramp and deployment of our Rack Scale AI solutions. Despite supply chain challenges in the industry, our global manufacturing team executed well in delivering record revenue. Order strength remains strong from global large data center and enterprise customers. AI GPU platforms, which represent over 90% of Q2 revenue continue to be the key growth driver.

During Q2, the enterprise channel revenue segment totaled $2 billion, representing about 16% of revenue versus 31% in the prior quarter. That's up 42% year-over-year and up 29% quarter-over-quarter. The OEM appliance and large data center segment revenue was $10.7 billion, representing approximately 84% of Q2 revenue versus 68% in the last quarter. This was up 151% year-over-year and up 210% quarter-over-quarter. For Q2 FY '26, one large data center customer represented approximately 63% of total revenue.

By geography, the U.S. represented 86% of Q2 revenue, Asia 9%; Europe, 3%; and the rest of the world, 2%. On a year-over-year basis, U.S. revenue increased 184%. Asia grew 53%, Europe decreased 63% and the rest of the world increased 77%. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, U.S. revenue increased 496%, Asia decreased 49%, Europe decreased 51% and the rest of the world increased 53%. The Q2 non-GAAP gross margin was 6.4% versus 9.5% in Q1. Gross margins were impacted by customer and product mix as well as higher freight, production and expedite costs as we began to ship new platforms on a large scale.

We had significant operating leverage during the quarter with total non-GAAP operating expenses representing 1.9% of revenue versus 4.1% last quarter. Q2 GAAP operating expenses were $324 million, up 14% quarter-over-quarter and up 8% year-over-year. On a non-GAAP basis, operating expenses were $241 million, which was up 18% quarter-over-quarter and up 6% year-over-year. Operating expenses were up quarter-over-quarter, largely due to higher sales expenses. Non-GAAP operating margin for Q2 was 4.5% compared to 5.4% in Q1. Other income and expense for Q2 totaled a net income of $26 million, reflecting $51 million in interest income on higher cash balances, partially offset by $25 million in interest expense primarily related to our convertible notes.

The tax provision for Q2 was $99 million on a GAAP basis and $122 million on a non-GAAP basis, resulting in a GAAP tax rate of 19.8% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 20.6%. Q2 GAAP EPS was $0.60 compared to guidance of $0.37 to $0.45 and non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.69 versus guidance of $0.46 to $0.54 due to higher revenue and operating leverage. The GAAP fully diluted share count increased sequentially from 663 million in Q1 to 673 million in Q2, and the non-GAAP share count increased from 677 million to [ 688 ] million over the same period.

Cash flow used in operations for Q2 was $24 million compared to $918 million used in the prior quarter. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, Q2 operating cash flow reflected higher net income, offset by higher accounts receivable and inventory levels and aided by higher accounts payables. Q2 closing inventory was $10.6 billion, up from $5.7 billion in Q1 as we prepared for continuing strength in Q3 shipments. CapEx for Q2 totaled $21 million, resulting in negative free cash flow of $45 million for the quarter. During the December quarter, we expanded our access to working capital to fund growth, executing a $2 billion cash flow-based secured revolving credit facility in the U.S. In January, we also closed an approximately $1.8 billion secured Taiwan revolving debt facility. At quarter end, our cash position totaled $4.1 billion, while bank and convertible note debt was $4.9 billion, resulting in a net debt position of $787 million compared to a net debt position of $579 million in the prior quarter.

Turning to the balance sheet and working capital metrics. The cash conversion cycle significantly improved from 123 days in Q1 to 54 days in Q2. Days of inventory decreased by 42 days to 63 days versus 105 days in the prior quarter. Days sales outstanding increased by 6 days to 49 days versus 43 days in Q1, while days payables outstanding increased by 32 days to 58 days versus 26 days in Q1.

Turning to the outlook for Q3 FY '26. We expect net sales to be at least $12.3 billion. GAAP diluted net income per share of at least $0.52 and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of at least $0.60. We expect gross margins to be up 30 basis points relative to Q2 FY '26 levels. GAAP operating expenses are expected to be around $354 million, which include approximately $74 million in stock-based compensation expenses that are excluded from non-GAAP operating expenses. The outlook for Q3 of fiscal year 2026 fully diluted GAAP EPS includes approximately $62 million in expected stock-based compensation expenses, net of the tax effects of $19 million, which are excluded from non-GAAP diluted net income per common share.

We expect other income and expenses, including interest expense to result in a net expense of approximately $22 million. The company's projections for Q3 FY '26 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted net income per common share assume a tax rate of 19.6%, a non-GAAP tax rate of 20.2% and a fully diluted share count of 684 million for GAAP and 699 million shares for non-GAAP. Capital expenditures for Q3 are expected to be in the range of $70 million to $90 million. For full fiscal year 2026, we expect at least $40 billion in net sales. Michael, we're now ready for Q&A.

Great. Matthew, can you roll the queue?

[Operator Instructions] First question is from the line of Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital.

Yes, congrats on the solid results here relative to the guide. Just -- I want to just ask about margins. And I have a few day questions they want to ask you here, but they're all margin related. I guess the first is with regards to -- you mentioned, I think, 90 days ago that December quarter, you expect it to be the sort of the low watermark quarter in gross margins, and you're guiding for Q-over-Q improvement for the March quarter. Do you still think that things progress expansive from here, Charles, you made some comments around customer mix. It's been a headwind. Do you think it continues to improve? And I have 2 quick follow-ups, Dave, just margin related after that.

Yes. Thank you for the question. Yes, the customer mix, we are improving quarter after quarter. Now we have many more large-scale customer, I would like to say. So that will improve our profitability. The other factor is -- last quarter, I mean, December quarter, the GP300 was a little bit new to us. So a lot of expedite transportation cost.

And now, I mean, product is getting mature. So those expedite transportation costs will be dramatically reduced and tariff impact also improving. And -- so overall, especially DCBBS also increasing for our -- for our gross margin. So I believe our gross margin will start to improve quarter after quarter.

Charles, that's great context. Really appreciate it. And actually, Charles, one of my 2 clarifications here is from something you said in your prepared remarks, you said higher net margin. And so I guess you just clarified you expect gross margin to go up. Maybe this is a Charles or Dave question. Dave, you mentioned OpEx leverage. The OpEx as a percentage of sales was really attractive this quarter. It's like 1.5% -- I guess, less than 2%. But should we expect -- I think it's the second quarter in a row, you drove OpEx leverage last quarter, this September quarter for the first time in a while.

But now you have this really attractive -- the most attractive OpEx as a percentage of revenue in a while. So are you -- is the company entering a period of not only gross margin expansion, but OpEx dollar leverage as well structurally? And that's it for me guys.

Yes, exactly. I mean economical scale will help us to improve the cost -- our cost, right? So that will impact our gross margin and especially our operation margin. And again, DCBBS [indiscernible] Super Micro for more business in service, in software, in overall infrastructure service to customer. So all those factors are positive to our margin improvement.

Next question is from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.

This is MP on behalf of Samik Chatterjee. I just wanted to double-click on your full year guidance. You said $40 billion for FY '26. If I back into the implied 4Q number, that implies significant quarter-over-quarter moderation. So is that just conservatism being embedded into the full year outlook? Or like do you see definite indications from your order trends that 4Q will imply sequential moderation? And I have a follow-up as well.

Yes. I believe we say minimum $40 billion is a relatively conservative number. So our business indeed will continue to grow, especially our DCBBS that attract a lot of customers who want to build a data center quicker, less power consumption, less cost -- I mean, better cost and also more reliable and easy for management. So we are getting more and more customers come to us.

And for my follow-up, I wanted to ask about DCBBS. You highlighted it being 4% of profits in first half. Can you please help us understand like the contribution in terms of revenues? And then you also said it will increase to double-digit contribution by end of calendar year. So how does that translate to overall gross margin trajectory?

Yes. Thank you. I mean, as you know, DCBBS is still a new product line to us. We officially introduced that product about 6 months ago. So in the first 2 quarters, I mean, September quarter plus December quarter, indeed, it is our first 2 quarters. So the revenue is still relatively small, but because the profit is much better. So overall, it contributed about 4% to our overall profit in last 6 months. And looking forward, it will continue to grow very quickly. So we are very happy to see more and more customers like DCBBS to speed up their data center build-out with EDR for management, EDL for maintenance and our profit will continue to grow because of DCBBS especially.

Next question is from the line of Asiya Merchant with Citi.

Good results here relative to the guide. I just had 2 quick ones. One, just there's a lot of discussion about component availability, supply constraints. If you could just talk to us about your guide and relative to that, is that minimum $40 billion guide a constraining number -- given the supply constraints? In other words, if supply wasn't an issue, could that number be greater? And then just on customer concentration, I think the commentary suggested that some of the geos did decline on a year-on-year basis as well as on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

So again, relative to the guide, how should we think about the ramp of DCBBS across those various geographies for the back half of this fiscal year and into -- through calendar '26?

Yes, you are right. We already consider component price keeping growing. So with that, that's why we try to be conservative kind of commit to $40 billion. If the cost -- if the shortage situation improve quickly, for sure, our [indiscernible] revenue will be more than that. And as to DCBBS is globally almost every region, customer like DCBBS because it helps them easier to build a data center. It's kind of like a one-stop shop. We provide not just computing node, I mean storage node, switch node and disk cooling subsystem including battery cell, including some energy backup. So it kind of makes customers' job to build a data center much easier. So the impact is global. We see global-wide more and more customers like our DCBBS solution, and we are aggressively preparing to grow the support.

Next question is from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs.

To ask another question on the new DCBBS disclosure. Encouraging to hear that growing to double-digit share of profit by the end of calendar '26. Can you talk about the investments that you need to make here to expand the capabilities? I know Charles, you mentioned some in the prepared remarks as well as your go-to-market offering to have this increased penetration of DCBBS? And then I have a quick follow-up as well.

Yes. Indeed, we started to develop our DCBBS pretty much about 12 months ago. So we already consistently invested in that area. And so far, we have about 10 items, including the CDU, including chilled door, including the power shelf, battery backup, water tower, management software. So we have about 10 items available now, and we will introduce another 3 to 5 items in the next few months or next few quarters.

So the data center building block solution will be getting more complete, and that's why it will be easier for customers to build a data center. It's not just easier, quicker to build their data center, but also make their data center modularized. So it's easier for management, easier for maintenance and easier for scale up.

Great. And just on the margin profile of DCBBS, could you remind us what you've said in the past about what that looks like relative to the sales that you typically have towards your large Neo cloud and GPU as a Service customers?

It's for sure, gross margin -- net margin are much higher for DCBBS because it's so unique. And again, we are the first company to build predesigned, prevalidated, pre-optimized data center solution for customers. So the margin is much better, for sure, more than 20%. And we are happy to make the product line really strong, really complete as soon as possible.

The next question is from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

For the first one, I'll ask a follow-up on margins. David, you mentioned expedite costs, component cost increases, shortages. And I think last quarter, you talked about increased investments in engineering support and services to help new customers. Can you help us size all of these things? How much did they impact gross margins in the December quarter? And what's baked into guidance as impact from these things in the March quarter? And I have a follow-up.

Yes. We don't break those things out, Ruplu, but we can just say that the costs were up in each of those areas. So in other words, higher transportation and expedite in order to move things around and get things delivered to the customer faster. But we have -- I can tell you that over the past year, we've had increases as we have ramped up the new technologies and prepared for mass shipments.

Okay. As a follow-up, can I ask, I think -- or Charles talked about component shortages and you're being a little conservative on the guide. Are component shortages, like which areas are they in? And then component cost increases, are they actually impacting data center demand, either on the AI side or on the regular non-GPU server side? A component cost increases a real factor?

And if I can sneak one more in, this DCBBS product that you have, can we infer anything about the type of customers who are buying that? Like if you're thinking that you're going to sell more, it's going to be more -- a bigger percent of your sales. Does that mean that the customer mix is also changing? Do enterprise customers use more of these? Or what type of customer likes to use more of the DCBBS packaged solution?

Thank you for your question. Indeed, the key component shortage at this time is the main reason because the AI and the large data center demand are growing. So the shortage because the demand is getting so strong, not because of production capacity is reduced. So that's a good sign. So basically, it's because the industry are growing, and we are part of the major growing company. So that's why I believe the impact to us, yes, the cost will be impact, but won't hurt us too much. That's first question.

And second, I mean, DCBBS, who need the DCBBS, I would like to say all the people like to build a data center. Doesn't matter they are large scale, middle-sized scale or small scale because our DCBBS just simply provide more choice for customers to go for one-stop shop or buy everything from everywhere by themselves. And obviously, one-stop shop save their time, make sure when they put the things together, it works. And quickly, when you put things together, it work and optimize. That's why it's optimized not just time to delivery, but time to online. Customers use our DCBBS, their data center can go for online, go for operation quickly. So I would like to say global people need DCBBS kind of building block solution.

The next question is from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland.

Congrats on the strong results and guidance. A little bit of different question here. So look, Super Micro brought DLC to the market one generation faster than when it became part of NVIDIA reference architecture. It's now apparent that Super Micro has brought to the market one generation faster, dry cooling towers, which is related to higher inlet temperatures as part of Blueprint reference design. My question is that do you expect Super Micro to continue to bring to the market one generation faster the power efficiency advantages before NVIDIA makes it part of their reference architecture? Is it going to be part of Super Micro's branding?

Yes. As you know, NVIDIA is a very strong company, and we work with them very closely. And, however, because of our strong engineering background, our big engineering team. So before we are able to make our total solution one generation or 6 months earlier than others. Now and in the future, I believe we will be still able to bring a total solution to market earlier than others, especially help customers build a data center, build their cloud -- AI cloud, time to online quicker than others, if not 6 months earlier, at least 3 months or 4 months earlier. And that's still a big help. So I'm very confident that our future growth should be still very strong.

Great. And then for my follow-up question, your 10% customer, -- was that the primary driver of the upside that you saw in the quarter? Do you expect them to remain a 10-plus percent customer in the March quarter? How should they traject? And then you also did sign Datavault, a pretty big contract with Datavault 6 or 9 months ago. Is that starting to ramp in as well?

Basically, because our foundation is getting much stronger than before ever, especially our kind of total solution, data center building block total solution is strong. So we are gaining broadly good customer from the older territory. So more than 10% or not is hard to say because now our revenue will grow very fast. Very soon, I hope I can say we have more than $50 billion or $60 billion revenue, not to pay, but hopefully very soon. So more and more large customer is working with us. So that's a very exciting condition.

Next question is from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company.

Let me add congratulations on the nice outlook. I guess, Charles, David, you had a 63% customer in the December quarter. As you look at sort of the second half of fiscal '26, do you expect revenue to diversify significantly? Or do you think that, that large customer continues to be pretty concentrated in the March and the June quarters? And then I've got a follow-up.

Sometimes it's not easy to predict because customers sometimes shift their schedule of pull in or push out. So -- but overall, we are very happy that now we have many more large-scale customers. So the customer is more diversified and overall revenue will grow quickly. And at the same time, DCBBS and [ software ] grow our value. So overall, we are on a very healthy track now.

Got it. So understanding that the customers can push and pull out, right now, the forecast shows increasing diversification over the next couple of quarters.

Yes. I mean because of growth still very fast, that's why now we are focused on more about how to kind of maybe -- what should I say, kind of how to grab more money to grow even faster, right? So if we have more cash for sure we can grow even faster. But even if we do not grab more money, I guess, because of more diversified customer base and also more higher-value system, more higher value to solution. So that will help us grow business.

Understood. And my follow-on, Charles, in your prepared comments, you mentioned the upcoming platform transition to Vera Rubin and the Helios system from AMD. I'm just wondering, have you guys started to get orders for those systems for delivery in the second half? Or is it too early to start to get orders for those systems?

Yes, we have a lot of highly interested customers, some already engaged, and we hope we can deliver as soon as possible. But still, it depends on our partner, depends on when their Vera Rubin or AMD solution will be ready. So we are working very closely with them. Once they are available, we like to deliver to customers quickly. And yes, today, we already have some good commitment from customers.

Next question is from the line of John Tanwanteng with CJS Securities.

Congrats on the nice quarter and outlook there. I just wanted to ask a little bit more about the big versus smaller customer mix that you're expecting in the future and the pipeline that you see. Are you expecting smaller customers to become a greater percentage of sales? Or is it the opposite? And the reason I ask that is because these bigger customers seem to have that pricing leverage you mentioned. If you could have any color there, that would be helpful.

Yes. Thank you for the question. Yes, we understand we need more customer, especially a more diversified customer base, enterprise. So we are very aggressively growing enterprise midsized or even kind of enterprise customers as well. So I mean, our customer diversified is a very important direction to us now. So I guess [indiscernible] large customer and lots of kind of high number of enterprise accounts.

Okay. Got it. And then just on the Vera Rubin question, and I guess the migration to the 800-volt data center. I was wondering if there's any opportunity for you to drive greater differentiation in this next cycle upgrade compared to the past couple. Is there anything about the whole platform and data center architecture that gives you more or less opportunity compared to the last cycle of Blackwell and Hopper?

Yes. I mean that's why I say NVIDIA provides a very good solution. And based on that, we optimize the whole data center building block solution for our customers and aim to help them build the data center quicker and more reliable, easy for management and [ lower cost ] including energy consumption, including energy backup and maybe too early to say, including energy kind of grid power replacement. So we have a complete plan for the whole solution, but some other systems are still too early to say too much at this moment.

Next question is from the line of Mark Newman with Bernstein.

Congrats on a great quarter and great outlook. Just curious, if you just take a step back, I mean, what's changed? You've got a big step-up here in sales, gross margins down quite a lot, but you're guiding forward for solid sales to continue. So is this just a reflection of a tougher pricing environment and Super Micro having to react to tougher pricing environment and thus winning back more share? Or is this just catching up to -- as you referred to the previous quarter -- previous couple of quarters, you mentioned about a few orders getting pushed out. So is this just catch-up of the orders? Or is this a reflection of a more aggressive pricing strategy?

And I guess, importantly, for me, like trying to think about forward estimates going forward, I mean you guided for the short term, but how do we think about gross margins longer term? Is this -- this kind of range here to stay? Or are we looking at getting back to -- into the high single-digit, low double-digit range gross margin like you were before?

Thank you. As an engineering company, we, for sure, have some choice. We can continue to grow larger account aggressively or spend more effort to develop technology, the product and to grow more enterprise account. So we are doing both ways basically. And -- so the gross margin -- net margin ratio, we are expecting to grow to a double digit as soon as possible. David, you may add something.

Sure. We think that we've established ourselves with a number of deployments that we've made as being really the premier provider of the most current technologies that are available in the market. And we think with those strong installations, we've broadened our reach into the market. And so we think that we're trying to target both, as Charles mentioned, both large-scale and smaller scale customers and mid-tier customers. But we want to serve all the customer bases that are out there and that are attracted to our products with -- and bring them the very best technologies. We think ultimately, that drives the margins, yes.

The next question is from the line of Brandon Nispel with KeyCorp.

Just I think a couple of quick clarification questions. One for David. David, you raised some new capital this quarter. Maybe just help us understand how you're thinking about working capital for the rest of this year. And then other income came in about $50 million above your guide. Really what drove that? And then just one quick follow-up question.

Sure. The other income was just -- was higher interest income that we had because our cash reserves had grown. And so we were earning good interest income. However, that was quickly taken up by the fact that, as I mentioned last quarter, we had well in excess of $13 billion of orders for purchase orders for delivery. And so we immediately had to use that. That's why our accounts receivable, our inventory went up. And so we took in not only 2 different $2 billion or $2 billion and $1.8 billion credit facilities. We also set up an accounts receivable factoring. So we have access to over $5 billion of additional capital. And if we continue to have growth, then -- we have access to additional capital in the marketplace. But right now, we think that for the current outlook, we have adequate capital to meet our needs. And when I say current, I mean [indiscernible] the coming quarters.

Got it. Just on the factoring, the securitization facility, did you utilize that at all this quarter? And then on the 63% customer, was that a previous 10% customer?

So to the first question, we did not use it during the December quarter, but we have subsequently. To your second question, Super Micro has -- does most of its business with repeat customers. So I'll just leave it at that.

But at the same time, we add a lot of...

We've added a lot of new logos at the same time. That's right. And it's because of those successful customers.

Okay. But we don't know if the 63% customer is new to the 10% customer mix or if it's a previous 10% customer. Is that right?

Yes. I'll just refer you to the 10-Ks and Qs on that. Yes. By the way, I do want to clarify one thing in my narrative regarding the fully diluted share count. So the GAAP fully diluted share count increased sequentially from 663 million to 694 million shares. So -- and then the non-GAAP share count increased from 677 million to 709 million. So there was just a -- I noticed a typo on there. So please forgive the correction.

All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining. I just want to just inform you that we had heard there were some technical difficulties with the webcast provider. A replay will be provided after the call, so you can catch up on that. Thank you for joining today.

That concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining. Tim Long here, Barclays IT hardware and comm equipment analyst. Happy to have Super Micro, Michael with us today. I appreciate the time. I know it's a pretty busy one. You go through the safe harbor, you're good.

Oh, yes. I forgot about that. Please refer to our safe harbor statements on our website for -- regarding forward-looking statements.

[indiscernible] memory. You need..

shortener version [indiscernible].

Okay. Great. All right. We've got some stuff to go through here. Maybe we'll just hit on kind of the hot investor questions that we're getting. Maybe let's just recap. Obviously, last quarter, you had some pushouts and maybe just walk us through kind of what caused it and how you read into that as we look forward into future deployments?

Yes. So from that perspective, I think if you look at what's going on in the end markets, in the industry, there's a lot of dynamicism happening and we had some configuration changes that delayed some shipments. Obviously, we're -- I would say, obviously, we're through that. We talked about the December quarter at the time when $13 billion in orders for GB300, which is a pretty massive number, and we moved the needle on the guidance to from $33 billion to $36 billion. So visibility, demand all look really good. I think we've seen some evidence recently of others in the spectrum talking about increased CapEx. So that environment is cooking right now.

Okay. And then just talk a little bit about these configuration changes. They've happen before, not just the Super Micro to others in the industry. It just seems there's a lot more complexity. So at the end of the day, does this -- do these type of dynamics, obviously, it's a pushout, not great in the near term. But is this dynamic of things getting more complicated, a positive for Super Micro? How do you view it?

So we view it -- there are some folks that talked about standardization and what we're seeing from an end customer perspective is that everyone has some degree of differentiation or complexity. So if you think about what we're trying to do, not every customer is going to run a GB300, not every customer is going to run Vera Rubin in the future. There's multiple verticals and stacks that NVIDIA is trying to support. They're similar with AMD, similar with the ASIC, the ASIC debate, and there's multiple players there. You have Intel's in the mix and you have ARM in the mix. And so what we're trying to do is support an application optimization for our customer base. And it's big and broad, and the market opportunity is large. And so where we're going as we move forward is to support AI applications in mass where our competition might be just building one product for one solution. So we're doing that. And at the same time, we're solution setting around it in DCBBS. And it all goes down to the point of like complexity. And so future racks are going to look different than the traditional rack, right? There might be power side cards, et cetera. There's lots of things. Liquid cooling is a pretty big component. And so we're supplying all the componentry that surround that and the margin profile there has improved. So as we move forward, we'll be a full stack supplier for AI and other enabled application solutions. So it will make Super Micro look a lot different as we go out of several quarters, if not 1 or 2 years. And if you believe the $1 trillion market that some folks talk about or [ 3 or 4 ], and we're just 10% of the market where we kind of are today. It's a $100 billion opportunity that we'll get to serve as we move forward. And that's tremendous. And again, it's scale and then we're all in on building that for our customer base.

Okay. Great. maybe you mentioned the really positive orders in the revenue outlook. Just how do you -- how do we think about visibility? Obviously, this is a business where there's big chunky deals and something can change late. So how do we get comfort in kind of linearity? Or is it -- do we get to a point where the orders in the backlog book is so big that there's a little bit more flexibility to build to it?

Well, that would be great from a standpoint of visibility, I think we have very good visibility and we think that, that will ultimately come to play. So this gave us the confidence to go from $33 billion to $36 billion for fiscal '26, which is a June year-end for us. So I think we're -- our guidance practice here will reflect that as we move forward. So I think we can just articulate that more precisely as we move forward.

Okay. You mentioned the industry worries about standardization and gross margins, and you mentioned some of the things. If you just elaborate a little bit on what you think develops over the next few years that enables the Super Micro to maybe improve that gross margin percentage on these big AI type deals?

So in the short term, we have a couple of different levers, right? One, customer mix has had a pretty big influence. As you can imagine, there's been a few operators that have been building out and scale, give me as much as you can -- as soon as you can. So customer mix there and some of these customers are large and have buying power. You have product mix and then you have manufacturing efficiencies. And so as the customer base broadens out, and we talked about this in our last call, we said that for fiscal '26, we would anticipate adding 2 to 4 more scale customers on top of the 4 that we already have. we would grow to 4, and then we would add more scale customers. In Q1, we added a new scale customer and grew with significantly one of our larger customers. So we're tracking from that perspective. But as more and more customers come into the flow, there's an expansion in neocloud space, there's an expansion with respect to sovereign opportunities. As a customer base expands out, we believe that, one, they will be able to mix up with product. Two, they'll have less -- potentially less purchasing power. And three, as we lean in on the manufacturing efficiencies, we can deliver a better. We'll iron out some of the inefficiencies. And if you think about this quarter, December, at least [ 10.5% ] as a brand-new product in mass coming through to the factory. So there was a higher cost, as you well know, following hardware, any launch has overhead. And so this has just happened to be a lot of overhead because of the size and the quantum of this and which lends to the opportunity as we move forward, ironing that out, supporting a massive amount of differentiated product sets and adding on the DCBBS, that's building a whole new scale company as we move forward that will support. Again, we go back to the 10% of the $1 trillion, that's a big opportunity for Super Micro and there's margin opportunity and the operating structure is fairly lean as we do this. So we're moving fast to address a large opportunity, and we think we're advantaging ourselves across the board relative to our competition.

Okay. Yes, it does seem some of the -- your large competitors have seen stability in overall margins, and it seems much more predictable now than it was maybe a year ago. Would you agree with that or in general?

From our perspective [indiscernible] I would imagine that we've been -- the dynamics have been so intense that we've been guiding margins for a quarter at a time, right? Again, we've just basically have built a brand-new system at scale in one quarter that we didn't do the prior few quarters, right? So as we move forward and as things change, it's hard to predict where that will be. But the goal is to move the needle on that to the point where we're double-digit gross margins as we move forward. And that will come as a factor of, again, customer mix, product mix and manufacturing efficiencies. So all those things we're working hard on to move those needle on that as we build a bigger, better company.

Okay. Sounds good. You mentioned in their DCBBS, data center building block solutions. So I just got to make sure I got...

A lot of letters. It's a lot of letters.

Maybe just walk us through kind of what that is, how it's differentiated and what do you think that's going to mean to the company?

So complexity has been -- has grown in the data center, we've been moving forward with that, right? So if you look at the past, what we have always done is more performance in the rack, better power delivery, so to speak, or power savings, more performance, et cetera. So more packaging, more complexity. So this is moving beyond just the rack. And so we see our customers potentially needing more of the -- whether it's cabling services, whether it's the power element, whether it's liquid cooling element, all these things wrapped around. So we have -- I believe we're up to multiple dozens of SKUs to help enable a data center build for each unique customer opportunity. So we're trying to encapsulate as much of that for the customer as we move forward. There's battery backup. There's power shells. As you look at some of the newer rack and development, power side [ card ], their liquid the air cooling elements. So we're putting all those together, depending on what the customer is, what the customer need is. So building a business off of enabling data sets, including the service element to them. And storage and ultimately, switching will be a part of the complex for them in various different segments.

Okay. I mean it's still pretty early. Do you have any sense of customer feedback and what at your bigger customers that might be looking at this or liking about it?

so we've scoped out a few from that perspective, and we are already delivering to some of our customers, some of those cooling elements to help them lower their -- or increase their PUE, right? So there's some early signs of that moving forward. I think the next milestone markers will be when will enable a few of the sovereigns, and we have equipment POCs in many different locations around the world. As those expand because we think that the sovereigns are likely not to run in hyperscale environments, right? There'll be some segregation of workloads, those will have more requirement for our full stack, and we'll grow with them and that should be reflected in results in future quarters.

Okay. Great. Maybe if we could touch on capacity a little bit. It's an industry-wide topic for everyone in value chain. So I know you guys you're building and increasing your rack output. So maybe walk us through the time line there and what that's going to do for revenue opportunities?

So we have multiple locations, Silicon Valley, Taiwan, Malaysia and the Netherlands. And we're looking for more sites in Americas. And we've been expanding capacity. Currently, we're planning to exit fiscal '26 at 6,000 total racks, 3,000 of them will be liquid cooled. And from that perspective, we will be unlikely to be satisfied with those results, right? We've continually added capacity as we move forward. But if you take a look at what the liquid cool racks, ASP commands, it's a pretty big price tag. I'd say, it's a $3 million per rack kind of price tag. It gets you to a pretty ample revenue opportunity if you do the math. So we're cognizant of that. But we're also cognizant of making sure that these facilities are producing the most reliable and efficient systems for end customers. So our capacity plans are in line with what we think is the opportunity easily to be able to support the figures we talked about earlier.

Okay. And you mentioned the $1 trillion or $3 trillion or $4 trillion. So this is not the end. I'm assuming that it's [indiscernible].

Well, It's not the end, but at the same time, if you -- like the dynamic -- if the opportunity set continues to expand and again, it's tied to the application. We're all in San Francisco right now, and you see the Waymo's buzzing around this city, but if that becomes a nationwide thing, there's to be multiple vendors supplying autonomous driving vehicles, whether it's the transportation sector for trucking, et cetera, it's a huge opportunity, right? So naturally unit volume should expand, data center capacity should expand, right? So -- and our partners, whether it's NVIDIA or AMD or [ beyond ], are talking about very large market TAMs, and we're in support of all of those. And so those are the numbers that we're kind of benchmarking with you off of. And again, we're roughly 10% of the market right now. We have a much bigger share, I think, of AI equipment than that number. But if it continues in that path, we'll certainly need capacity to serve it. And then there'll be capacity requirements for the DCBBS element, right. That's where this non-rack that it's not liquid cooled. So we'll focus on both of those things. And the unit volumes, et cetera, we'll be able to support the end markets.

Okay. I wanted to take some time to talk about customers and concentration. And you mentioned typically having 2 to 4 scale customers and adding another 1 last quarter. How diverse and it sounds like you're going to add some more, how diversified do you see the business be coming if we look out a few years?

Well, this is an interesting question. You've been covering the space for quite some time. And if you think of the traditional data center enterprise business, right, which I think a lot of analysts are looking at it from that lens, if we're looking at it from the lens of application, application optimization and you think about the context of the hyperscalers and what they're doing, they have multiple different applications that they're delivering to their end customers that are running on different various forms of equipment that need a certain amount of support. They're starting to take workloads and put it into the neoclouds. And that's an amazing kind of element there. So we have a large footprint with the neoclouds and they're expanding. They're offering services. At the same time, they're getting services from the hyperscalers. Enterprises are testing out AI workloads in the neoclouds, whether or not they bring them in-house or not, remains to be seen. We do expect them to do that to control their own data. There will be enterprises that are data-centric that all want to support that as well. So you think of the famous application companies that could turn whatever their enterprise application is into an AI source. So we'll be able to support all of those things. So the customers base is, from our perspective, is anyone that cares about application optimization. So we're not so focused on, is it an enterprise customer? Is it -- what segment it is. But most customers now are aligned to application optimization. So it opens up a big world for us. So we have neocloud, we have enterprises and sovereigns is a grouping. Customer concentration right now is a little bit skewed because the land grab is on for certain players. So they've been moving fast, and we expect the rest of the market to catch-up and backfill, right? So we'll have plenty of opportunity with a broad product set. That all said, by [ virtue of ] success with some of the known customers that we have, large technology companies, I think most folks know that we have something to do with the [ Oman ] complex, right? So very forward-thinking application development there. Operators understand that we're applying and supporting these customers, and they're coming to us. So there's really no large-scale customer that's not at least engaged with us in some respect, like what can you do for us and -- from either, a technology perspective or even a capacity perspective. So we expect the customer base to broaden out over time. Again, we have to if we're going to support trillion plus on the market opportunity in a fairly short order of time.

Yes, I get the focus on the big applications, but there's just so much focus on when the sovereigns are going to start hitting and everyone seems to be focused on sovereign and enterprise because there's the perception that they'll need more technology help and therefore, stack is better for Super Micro. So maybe just touch on where you are with those verticals?

So my understanding on that -- from that perspective, on the sovereign side, I know we have engagements across the globe. We have proof of concepts. We have agreements. I think the major hurdle -- not a major hurdle, but a large hurdle would be pre-Thanksgiving when there was quite a bit of a [indiscernible] in the White House and licenses being granted or at least approved for, say, Middle East -- Middle Eastern regions. So I think there's a lot of progress, and we'll see more signs of deployments as we get into '26. We're close to it right now. and the proof points will become obvious. And whether they deploy immediately or through a partner, yet remains to be seen, but there's a lot of activity, and we're involved in, like I said, almost a large amount of those. Okay.

You did mention the $13 billion last quarter in GB300 orders. Could you just talk a little bit about the complexion of that? Like how many big customers? Is it new -- some of it, new footprint, some of it is expansions?

On average, I would say it's -- there's a couple of customers in that cohort, but one was fairly large. So -- and I think there was a new -- there was some new and there was some old. So it was mix footprint.

Okay. I just want to touch on like Edge AI solutions. I think that's something you guys have talked a little bit more about. Maybe give us a sense how you see Super Micro playing there as we get more inferencing in Edge?

So we focused on solutioning for those type of opportunities with some of our partners, key partners. And so it's still early and still all to come, but if you would consider the RTX solution from NVIDIA. There's other elements and other ways to get to those markets. So we have lots of activity with -- on the IoT side or the Edge side. So we anticipate that to be a pretty big volume market opportunity for us downstream. Right now, I think the focus has been on the data center, data center building blocks, and that's an extension of that strategy, and it's on the come.

Okay. And then you mentioned before, not just NVIDIA, but AMD and custom ASICs. So what are you guys seeing as far as diversification from just the NVIDIA GPU engines?

I think from that perspective, we have deployments with AMD and scale with some of the large customers that are NVIDIA customers. And I think that they're taking those workloads that that are capable of running at scale and supporting the customer. So the AMD supporting the customer and the customers' workloads. And so I think there's ample opportunity for us. We're excited about the forward map that they have as well. And we see customers requiring them for different applications across the stack. So for us, we're in a very good position to be able to support either one. And like you said, there's customers who are running both of those solutions. I don't know if it's a dual-source strategy, if you want to call it that. But the ecosystem is expanding and ultimately, potentially that gets into the ASIC market and the multiple players there.

Does that present a different set of engineering challenges or...

I would imagine there's a lot of ability to leverage on the engineering side. They'll all be different, and we have half of this -- the force is engineering, and that's a key strength. And it's becoming more and more important, and we have teams working on different platforms across the stack. So that's a really big focus, and it's -- I think investors should understand that if you believe that this broadens out and there's different use cases, in different verticals or if there's a different model for specific industry verticals, we'll support that. And if you get a better cost per token because you're using Super Micro's engineered solution, we have a customer and we tend to retain customers quite for quite a long time because we work with their application, and we continue to make the evolution of technology to meet with they're trying to deliver customer. Tesla is a great example of that.

Okay. I do want to go back to maybe like kind of competition industry. It seems like you guys were pretty early in like rack scale type deployments, but now you have the 3 big semi companies doing racks themselves, you have most EMS and ODM focusing on instead of the piece parts, the full rack. So help me understand like that industry development and what positions you guys -- I think you've been doing it longer, but what positions you better there?

So what positions us really, really well is what our focus is, is to make that customer happy, right? And at each step of the way, I mean, we started out as a motherboard company. Every step of the way, it's like there's just more technology, more to do. And even the new platforms that everyone's talking about and like, well, this is going to be a standard. It's like there doesn't appear to be a standard anywhere at this point in time. We're enabling that technology. And if we can find new ways to either lower the power [ draw ] or improve the cooling element or enabling bandwidth or enabling connectivity that's in a better, broader way for the customer, I mean, that's all gold for us, right? And so we're doing that with all the different partners. And you can imagine the engineers are like kids in a candy store, trying to figure out what to do, at the same time, there's -- need a focus on the optimal cost solution. So the complexity increases, it favors what we're doing because we're all in on complexity. So that's one element. The second element is it's very understated is the reliability, the quality of what we're doing when we put these things together. These systems multitude, millions of parts just in a rack, but if we integrate all these things and make them work together collectively, and we can lower or improve -- lower the power by 2% or improve the performance by 1% through some architecture change of some sort or improvement. And you do that across scale for a scale operator, that's amazing for them, right? That's value. But at the same time, if the system is more reliable than someone who's basically assembling, you have increased reliability and the operators that's saves them bottom line costs. So better reliable equipment is a value proposition. So the combination of these things as we move forward, are going to be magnified. They're going to be magnified by multitudes of platforms. And if you look at it, who will be the leading supplier in 2027 for AI optimized applications, I would argue that we stand to be in a really good position to be that dominant supplier. We've shown increases in market share for the past couple of years relative to some of the brand names that you know well. And we continue to focus on the customer. And that's where, where the real value comes in, keeping the customer satisfied, and that's what we're optimizing for right now.

Okay. Great. We covered a lot on gross margin. You get that all the time. Curious about as you branch out into other technologies and get the building blocks together. It seems like there's a lot more engineering or investment intensity. So how do we manage really kind of R&D and OpEx profile in the wake of probably a more limited gross margin dynamic over time.

Well, I think we've always been a fairly lean and frugal organization while scaling up. And so that cadence and that focus hasn't changed, there could be periods where it's a little more intense, but the goal is to keep a lid on that and make sure that we're within our boundary, so to speak. So the efficiency of the organization is pretty excellent, which kind of goes back to supporting all the platforms and all of a sudden, we are the de facto standard, and there's no competing platform to offer changes the pricing dynamics. And with the sensitivity of the model and the change in the dynamics, they should translate to better returns for shareholders. And so that's the path that we're on, and it's a long-term view, but the company is all in on doing that and at scale, at a fast pace with the intensity of competition. And we seem to be winning more and more, witness $13 billion in orders for just this one platform in December alone.

Okay. Yes, maybe just one other back to kind of the customer side. You talked about -- just curious of your sense on how sticky the Super Micro platform is when you're in at a scale customer. There was a period where it was like someone wins a big deal and someone else wins a big deal. Everyone is obviously going to be dual sourcing or triple sourcing because it's getting so big. But talk a little bit about that stickiness and what is it that, that will keep you in a strong position at some of the bigger players?

So from that perspective, it's really making the customer happy with the technology and the reliability and the service element of that, this engineering support of that side of the house. And we've had some scaled customers that were not so scaled, not too long ago. And we continue to be not just in the hunt, but a dominant supplier, and we've grown with those companies. And so we think that, that will continue and the retention rate of our customer base is fairly high. Sure there could be sometimes where there's some puts and takes, but it's very high, and we look forward to satisfying those customers and keeping those customers. Now if we didn't keep those customers, at the same time, you'd be asking me a different question, right? So we're all about the customer and we keep them, we retain them, we grow them. And we're looking for ways to help them, and that kind of really led us to what's the next enablement, right? The next enablement is like the data center building blocks enablement as opposed to just providing them with one component. So that encompasses a lot of different platform opportunities for those customers. So keeping them happy, keeps them in the seat, and we've done a really good job by witness of the revenue growth over the past couple of years.

Okay. Great. I think we're bumping up against time here. So thank you, everyone, for joining. Mike, thank you.

Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for joining us. My name is Simon Leopold, Raymond James Semiconductor and Data Infrastructure Analyst. Pleased that you're able to join us here in New York or folks on the webcast. So this afternoon, we've got for our next fireside chat, Michael Staiger, who is the SVP and Corporate Development Head for Super Micro. Michael, I think you've got a safe harbor, and we'll dive right into it.

Thanks for having us. Let me just make the following legal disclaimer. Please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially due to risks and uncertainties discussed in our SEC filings, which can be found on our website. All right. Now that that's out of way. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having us.

So we were joking before about how -- we've heard it so many times that we still have to read it. So I imagine most folks who came are somewhat familiar, but I'd like to see how do you prefer to introduce Super Micro to potentially a new investor.

Well, all right, that's an interesting approach. I would say from a new investor perspective, and you're thinking about what we're trying to do, what we're trying to accomplish and where we came from, most importantly, where we've always been focused on the dynamics of performance, power and price, so to speak, an application optimized system. We've noticed, obviously, that the AI generation was going to require different platforming, so to speak. And so if you think about the landscape and you think about NVIDIA, you think about AMD, you think about ASICs, you think about ARM and you think about the applications and you think about where hyperscalers play, and they have all kinds of applications that go beyond just using CPUs now, right?

So there's all kinds of infrastructure being stood up. We're optimizing for those applications across the ecosystem. So as we move forward, and we're thinking multiyears ahead, 2, 3 years ahead, end users will require different formats in different segments of the data center for different applications, whether it's models, whether it's inferencing, whether it's edge applications, whether it's IoT. And so we're optimizing the platforms for that. And so since we don't have legacy architecture to support and since we are 50% engineers, we literally are at the forefront of designing and developing systems to bring to customers on a global basis.

So I want to talk a little bit about your take on the AI demand environment. And I think part of the reason I think this question is not as obvious as maybe it first appears is press reports in the last couple of months about the idea that there's an AI bubble and it's not sustainable. I'm in print. So people know I'm an AI bull, so I'm not going to hide that. My biases are not to be hidden. But when you sort of encounter any kind of challenges, how do you -- how would you describe your take on the -- not just the current environment, but the durability?

Yes. So our take is a little bit different than, let's just say, Wall Street's take, right? Our take is from -- is derived from a customer interaction and the customer demand and the ecosystem and what we see. And so from that perspective, it's very robust. I'll just go back a little bit and just talk about where we recently guided our full year numbers up from $33 billion for fiscal '26 to $36 billion. Obviously, there's some demand in there.

Are you talking your fiscal year-end?

Fiscal year is June. End of June. And so when we're thinking about the demand environment, we also discussed and disclosed that we had $13 billion in GB300 orders alone in December that we discussed that we said that would be probably a multi-quarter deployment. And so if you think about what our customers do, neoclouds, enterprises and sovereigns, they're coming to us from all different directions. And from what we're seeing, the demand is just -- it just keeps getting better and broader. And then our ecosystem partners, as you can see, they're all expanding capacity.

And so there's a lot of smart people across the industries trying to address what essentially will be new applications. And I don't know if anyone here has taken a Waymo -- there's an AI element to that, of course, right? So it's just they're at the forefront of a pretty big application-driven market. So it looks pretty good, and we're going to be building to that across all the different stacks.

And maybe double-click a little bit in terms of who those customers are for Super Micro because so much of the -- I think, headlines are dominated by these hyperscalers. And then we talk about terms like neo and sovereign and enterprise. Help us understand what that mix is and who those are? What are they doing?

So the way we think about customers and the optimal customers for us is anyone that wants to leverage data to advance their business. So I think it's fairly well known that we've had customers like Tesla. We've had customers like Twitter, which is now X AI. I'm sure there's plenty of that stack. So those types of customers and the neocloud, the CoreWeave of the world, the Lambda of the world, the other neoclouds that are coming into the fold to serve this.

And the interesting -- like Applied Digital, et cetera. The interesting thing is that the neoclouds are getting workloads from the hyperscalers. And so the neocloud environment is starting to expand quite dramatically. And so I think people are -- and then you've seen a few -- not few but plenty of announcements about infrastructure and RPO and big transactions that the infrastructure may not yet have been built. And so the forward look there is there's going to be a lot of iron that needs to be engineered, manufactured, delivered, integrated and brought up to support the ambitions of our customers.

Now I guess we can accept the fact that there's going to be some lumpiness to the business because they're big projects. One of the transitions that seems to have been disruptive is going from NVIDIA's Hopper to Blackwell, where are you through that transition? And what lessons maybe did the company learn in terms of execution so that when we go through the next generation, how do you avoid that? What sort of needs to happen?

So from our perspective, to understand that we're scaling capacity, we're scaling go-to-market. We're scaling engineering capabilities. And so when we're looking on a forward basis and you think about what we talked about with respect to December, we essentially are standing up a massive brand-new product, right? And the cadence of any new product launch, any new hardware product launch tends to have a little bit of a headwind. And so we had a couple of factors in that element. This is the largest, most complicated system ever been delivered to mankind, and we're delivering it at scale.

And so I think the market needs to understand or appreciate that. So the lessons there from that standpoint is the scale of -- the size of the opportunity we see going forward and putting all those efforts into establishing that footprint, establishing a dominant position there and establishing probably the most reliable build from a system standpoint because when our customers are deploying our systems, the reliability of the systems and the engineering of the systems are very, very paramount to what they're doing. And so if we can deliver a lower cost per watt per compute for them, it directly translates back into their business models, especially in the neocloud and the service provider market. So we're doing an excellent job of doing that, and we will carry that forward in future generations.

Now there's another sort of technological transition that maybe you can help explain this to an audience that might not appreciate the terminology, but you're shifting to more rack scale systems. We talked about the idea of nodes to rack scale. So first, explain to people what that means. And then my real question is, is that a risk? Is this -- is this a phase where it's another challenge that could have stumbling blocks?

So I would say it's not a risk for us being the engineering powerhouse that we are. We started off motherboards, right, partial chassis and then servers, which we consider nodes. And then we've evolved into what you would consider rack scale. So at each step of the way, each turn of technology has become more and more complex, and there's more integration work that's required.

So we've actually taken that a step further, and we're developing what we call our data center building block solutions, which is all the ancillary equipment power cooling, storage and other elements to stand up an entire data center because when our customers come to us and they say, hey, we need to -- we want to get this compute platform together by virtue of delivering racks in the past where we've done a phenomenal job, and we can talk about the capacity that we're able to put together for our customers, they need. We see abilities to productize around that, and that's supportive of a better margin from our perspective, but a better experience for the customer.

And we tend to retain our customer. Once again, we mentioned one earlier, was started off a long time ago and has graduated with us as we -- as things got more complicated, we're able to do more complicated things for them at every turn. And that's what's got scaled the company from a couple of billion dollars a year to -- we're on our way to $36 billion.

And when you talk about retention or stickiness, what's the rationale? Is it essentially you're doing some customization? Or is there something unique or something differentiated? What creates that?

So we try to do like again, lower the cost per compute per watt for a where that is accomplished depending on what the customers' requirements are to deliver that application to them in a way that's best useful for them. So not every customer is the same, not the requirement is the same, but there's a lot of engineering and skill set that goes into what we're delivering to the customers for those that want to take advantage of that. We can do what we would call more reference architecture, capacity kind of builds are a little bit lower margin, but that's kind of where we're focused.

And it's the degree of the ecosystem itself, NVIDIA's platform is way more powerful than it was 2 years ago. AMD's platform is way more powerful as well than it was a few years ago. So it's more complicated, tolerances change, tightness with respect to the build itself and putting in cabling. There's the cooling element that were introduced into the systems that we're perfecting optimization of power, et cetera. There's a whole complication of the firmware, the integration, the cabling, all those types of things to get the customer to run at scale. It's a very complicated setup.

And the company has been growing its capacity fairly rapidly. Could you help folks understand maybe a little bit of sort of where you've come from, what you've added, where we are today and then where we're going. So how much more capacity do we need to add? How are we doing today?

I'm struggling to figure out where we -- where our prior capacity was. But I can remember that we were talking about 2,000 racks a month and 2,500 a month. And now by the end of fiscal '26, June, 3,000 racks on the liquid cooling side, total 6,000 racks. So we've come a long way into that kind of production environment. And if you were to think that the liquid cooled racks are the higher engineered solution with a higher ASP, the market is suggesting somewhere about 3 million or 4 million rack and at scale production, you can see that the revenue support there is quite large. And we've always built capacity in line with what we see long-term demand is. So we're very particular about making sure that they're stepped in process and there's no outsized CapEx requirements and it's scale it as we move forward.

But presumably, we shouldn't build models assuming 100% utilization all the time. So you've obviously given a full year revenue forecast. But when we think about kind of the long-term business model, is there sort of an optimized or a rule of thumb of what's the appropriate utilization to think of?

I don't think we've ever really given a specific kind of number because it's -- the boundaries kind of shift, but half utilization plus would be kind of a nice zone to be in. And so we also take a look at the market opportunity itself, and we've noticed that some of our platform partners are talking about a $1 trillion opportunity or in some cases, a $3 trillion opportunity. And currently, we have about 10% share of these platforms. And in aggregate, I think higher in AI-related infrastructure. And if we're 10% share of these higher -- these numbers that our partners are talking about, well, that's a $100 billion revenue opportunity that is literally right around the corner for us.

And if you match that to what our capacity numbers are right now today, you're saying, well, we're in line to serve that. And our customers want us to be able to serve that. So we're -- I think we're in a very good position to serve the market and to serve them at the leading edge and broaden out the base. Like I mentioned before, we have multiple different platform partners. We're not just supplying one particular product. We're architecting designs across the board for our customers to take advantage of it. So we'll be a platform provider of accelerated compute on a long-term basis. And we think that we -- I wouldn't say stand-alone, but we look very well positioned for future growth.

Now the other topic that the investors keep harping on profits. So I guess it's great that you can sell a lot of products, but the investors also like you to be profitable. Gross margins have naturally been under pressure in, I think, the whole space. I don't think it's unique to Super Micro. But I feel like it's always sort of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. What do you see as sort of the time line and the outlook for improving margins?

Well, one, you pinned it, like the dynamics in the market right now are tremendous. I don't think we've ever seen a period where we've had so much change so quickly. So from a margin perspective, we're guiding 1 quarter ahead on a margin front. And if you think about what we're doing right now this quarter and with the parameters that we provided, this is the largest, most complicated revenue product cadence that we've ever been on. And I don't know if the market really understands or appreciates that. So as we grind into that and solidify that as we move forward, we have mentioned that we will leverage this product set as we move forward.

The second piece of that would be we're also expanding the offering to the customers. So from a margin perspective, you're thinking customer mix is important, product mix is important and then manufacturing efficiencies are important. And we can control all 3. One of them is a little quicker to control than the others. The customer mix is starting -- we think the customer mix will broaden out. We see the product mix from our perspective broaden out as well, as we move forward. And all these things will come into play, and we've always wanted to operate in a very -- a much higher profit zone, and that's the goal of the company, and that's the goal of Charles to get there.

Now the other sort of aspect of, I guess, cost that's really been a hot topic is memory in that -- any time you build an AI platform, you have to buy memory chips, high bandwidth memory, DRAM in particular. How have you managed through that? Just as a side, I think we've all been surprised watching some of the earnings reports. It hasn't been as bad as feared, but it's our nature to worry about what comes next. So with that.

Yes. So in general, so if we're thinking about what we're delivering right now currently and likely in the future, there's a heavy skew towards AI-related systems. And so the DRAM element there is less of an issue for us. We tend to contract with our customers on, I wouldn't say real-time basis. But we're not forward buying massive amounts of memory. We're not making any bets on our supply chain. So like the period during COVID, we have a very flexible capabilities from a supply chain perspective. So we'll manage through it like we always have and try to minimize any impacts as we move forward. So not as exposed as the PC and it has an impact on the general server business. But again, our customers are really leaning in on the AI side. So not as exposed as some others.

Do you have ability to contractually pass these costs off? Can you?

So ultimately, if customers are looking to build out and the price of memory is higher and where -- that's what it is, they're going to be in a position where we'll have to be passing that cost on to them.

So you've got some flexibility.

We have some flexibility, yes.

So the other thing I sort of think about how the company has been evolving is I always looked at it as somewhere between the white box vendors and sort of your traditional OEMs and you've run lean. You generally are a pretty efficient company. But as you're sort of moving upmarket, moving more sort of branded type behavior, do you see the business model, the operating model changing, either becoming more R&D heavy or more marketing heavy? Or you sort of the culture is a culture and live with it?

I don't want to be as succinct as saying the culture is the culture. What I would say is that we're focused on the customer, okay? And we're focused on the dynamics from the end customer's perspective. And should that change radically, and there's always something new and better to do and to offer, and there's always a bevy of customers that want more. I'd like to frame it in the fact that 10% of the market is like the most high performance you can get, 10% of the market might be the lowest cost, the most efficient you get.

So somewhere in between, we're covering both of those ends, and we may move more towards the middle, but it really is going to be driven by what customers want. And what we're seeing is platform expansion, right, and opportunity expansion and product expansion for us to address that in DCBBS. So as we move forward and you think about what the company will be, we will be supplying AI accelerated platforms across data centers across the globe. That's where we're positioned right now.

So I'm going to ask a question and admit upfront, it's a little bit unfair. And so I'll preface it.

I love unfair.

Acknowledge it. In that -- Super Micro has sold to enterprises in the past. That's the unfair part is to pretend you never did. But when I think about what the sort of dominant branded IT companies spend on sales and marketing, it's in [indiscernible] it's a lot more than you spend. So it feels like a big challenge. How does Super Micro become more and more competitive without the same kind of sales and marketing budget for the broader enterprise market? Or is that just not on the table for you?

I think there's -- I think the view of what the market will be is changing, right? So it will favor what we are doing. To have the concentration of selling equipment to every mom-and-pop shop, so to speak, in that branded environment isn't really where we think the market may be going. In fact, in some respects, it could be going a little bit more to service provider and broadening out the service provider and then follows on with an enterprise element.

And so what's been helpful for us as we serve some of the enterprise customers that are technology forward and the service providers are technology forward, there's sort of an interplay there. And they're coming to us. DevOps people know that we are building the best gear and the best equipment. And so the branding element is a factor in the current environment, but will gradually fade as we do more for our customers and they come to us because, hey, Super Micro can do this for me. They did it for the CoreWeave, they did it for Tesla, they did it for -- that's very powerful from our perspective, and it's been a driver of business for us, and you can see it in the growth.

Yes. It's interesting in that when we -- at the time when we did the initiation of coverage, you were the sort of leader among the branded products and sort of chipping away at the white box. So I think -- I want to ask you about how you think about the competitive landscape and frame it in 2 dimensions because you sort of are competing against the white box on one side and the branded on the other. How do you think about that? Fight on 2 fronts?

I mean, sort of in a way, right? So the 2 fronts that you're talking about, I think the -- in general, we view our ability to bring a better product, whether it's for -- we'll design a better product. So what potentially could happen is that some of the customers that the hyperscalers are being served generally by some of the white box folks in mass. If they need something more and better and beyond with their own design, and we can deliver that, then that opportunity set opens up for us. And again, if you look at the behavior of the hyperscalers and the numerous amounts of new applications that they're trying to develop and the chipsets that they're trying to develop, et cetera, we should be able to serve -- we could serve them if they wanted to. But the rest of the market, at the same time, needs the skill sets that we have to bring them up.

So 2 fronts. We're very focused on, like I said, the customer and delivering the most performative systems for those folks at the lowest price and the best experience. So I think that in balance, the market is big enough to support what we're doing in a major way. So if the white box model is -- I still think it's going to be as static as people might be underwriting.

And then I guess we're thinking about other tools you can employ to grow into some new customers. And things I wanted to check on is you don't have a financing arm, some companies do. Are there ways you can tackle that without maybe burdening your balance sheet? Or are there sort of -- are you pursuing partnerships for expanding your market, working with other -- I think you did a deal recently with Nokia as an example.

Yes. So there's multiple different ways, channel programs and partners. And like, again, it's an example of folks coming to us and looking for our expertise to help them get to market, which is basically what we're doing for our platform providers. But from a standpoint of offering financing, I don't necessarily think that that's a limiting factor. Almost any of the customers can obtain -- there's plenty of sources for financing. So I don't think there's anything specifically on the table from a financing perspective, and I don't think it's holding us back at all. Obviously, it's in the numbers. It hasn't held us back.

And what about partners, OEM partners, go-to-market partners? How important is that?

I think they're important, and we will support if there's opportunity sets with a number of these folks to bring platforms jointly developed to the market to enable them and to enable the industry. So I think we're more than open to that. And I'm sure we're working with many on that front.

And are there aspects of the value chain that maybe you'd want to either become somewhat more vertically integrated? Obviously, you're not going to become a GPU vendor, but technologies like cooling or the racks. It seems as if your sort of core competency is the engineering and the manufacturing capacity. But so many companies sort of go down this path of incorporating elements to improve margins. Is that a logical part of the strategy?

So I think from a standpoint of the founder from Charles' perspective, that doing the best for the customer works and sometimes going down and owning something that we may not need to own because it may be out of favor 2 years, 3 years. So we'd be very, very careful in what we would consider a durable asset that would help us out. That said, as the company has moved from, let's say, the server level, right, to the rack to the data center level, there could be some things that could fit, but we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

And I want to talk a little bit about sort of supply chain resilience. So please correct me if I get this wrong. You've got U.S., Taiwan and Malaysia as your primary location.

And we have -- primary, we have the Netherlands.

Netherlands. And so if you think about your supply chain, what do you think are the risks? How do you see your ability to manage it? And what are the sort of greatest sensitivities? What would be the choke points? What's your weak link here?

Well, obviously, I'm not going to be seeing -- I don't think there is a weak link. But what I would say is that, one, we're expanding in all locations. We're expanding capacity in all the locations, including in California. We're looking at some new locations. We've been vocal about that, that could be Mid U.S. -- or whatever.

So we're always evaluating what we can do for our customers, where the customers may need that. You've seen a couple of things that we've done. We've established a federal subsidiary or federal entity to address that business directly. We've established a presence in the Middle East. So we're global, and we're expanding that. So if one site is advantaged from a delivery perspective or a production cost perspective, we can flex our capabilities there. So that's kind of how we've been operating, and it's been working pretty well.

So I guess maybe -- my constraint or sort of sensitivity question was, I feel like in the past, it was just the allocation of GPUs was what we could point at. More recently, it sounds like it's high-bandwidth memory is very tight. So what are the tightest parts of the supply chain? Maybe that's a different way to think about it.

Yes. So I mean, obviously, memory is the thing that people are pointing to. I would -- I don't think there's anything that's necessarily constraining us in that construct. So customers -- our customers tend to get the allocation of the GPUs. So they're aligned with us as their provider. So we -- and we've done a fantastic job of delivering to our customers, right? So that's why they keep coming back and ordering from us, and that's why we're getting the allocation that's the predominant point. So we're just continue to -- whether it was the supply crisis and COVID or whatever, there's all kinds of different challenges that we've managed through every one of them and continue to keep on the trajectory that we are from a growth perspective.

So if we sort of step back and think about kind of the vision of what Super Micro might look like 5 years from now, and let's do this on the assumption that the CEOs of AMD and Broadcom and NVIDIA are all correct. Let's just accept that. In that world, where do you see Super Micro in 5 years?

So that world exists, and I think it may -- will be a much larger company, $100 billion is more than on the table. Market share will be probably beyond where we are now because there will be customers that will be flexing in size and scale that needs our capacity, then we'll be able to deliver to that and the engineering support that goes around it. And it will be a very good outcome for the company long term.

And so...

And a branded name more than likely at that point in time. Because we will be supplying all the different platforms.

So if you were sort of encouraging an analyst who's monitoring your company, what metric or metrics to watch? Is it market share? Is it revenue growth? What should they be focused in?

I think right now, we're focused on revenue growth and market share. And those are very important because we can leverage a lot of different elements with the size and capacity that we will have, and we can modulate how we want to behave in the end market. So I think that's -- those are the primary goals I would keep you focused on.

So I want to check with the audience if we've got any questions out there before we -- so a question I always like to close with is, what do you think is either the most misunderstood or least appreciated aspect of the Super Micro story.

Well, I think, one, the least appreciated aspect is this product launch and scale is unbelievable, and it's fantastic. And that's just people are looking at the margin as opposed to like what we're doing, right? That's one thing. And so the second piece that I think that people are underestimating is like the applications that are going to be utilized in the future, like the bubble talk, right? So they're just starting to get underway.

And the more applications come to the market, the more the use of this data becomes useful in various different platforms, it will be -- it will look different. And I think analysts tend to look at the server business of the traditional how things worked in the old days versus like what they will look like tomorrow. And we're working on what they will look like tomorrow and people are completely missing that.

Well, great. Well, Michael, thank you very much for joining us today. Folks, thanks for joining us. Wrapping up the Super Micro.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Matt, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Super Micro Computer, Inc. Business Update Call. With us today are Charles Liang, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer; David Weigand, CFO; and Michael Staiger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development.

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, and thank you for attending Super Micro's call to discuss financial results for the first quarter and full fiscal year 2026, which ended September 30, 2025. With me today are Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Weigand, Chief Financial Officer. By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website.

As a reminder, during today's call, the company will refer to a presentation that is available to participants in the Investor Relations section of the company's website under the Events and Presentations tab. We've also published management's scripted commentary on our website. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, capital allocation and future business outlook, including guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 and the full fiscal year 2026.

These statements and other comments are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated, and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. You can learn more about these risks and uncertainties in the press release we issued earlier this afternoon, our most recent 10-K filing for fiscal 2025 and other SEC filings. All of these documents are available on the Investor Relations page of our website.

We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Most of today's presentation will refer to non-GAAP financial results and business outlook. For an explanation of our non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the accompanying presentation or to our press release published earlier today. The non-GAAP measures are presented as we believe that they provide investors with the means of evaluating and understanding how the company's management evaluates the company's operating performance.

These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. In addition, a reconciliation of non-GAAP to most directly comparable GAAP results is contained in today's press release and in supplemental information attached to today's presentation. At the end of today's prepared remarks, we'll have a Q&A session for sell-side analysts. Our second quarter fiscal 2026 quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, December 12, 2025. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Charles.

Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining today's call. Fiscal 2026 is off to a strong start as we continue the early phases of the dynamic AI growth trend. Demand for advanced AI compute and infrastructure solutions is evolving rapidly, and Super Micro is uniquely positioned to lead with innovative, high-quality and value-driven solutions, including our data center building block solution, DCBBS. The major highlight this quarter continued to be our industry-leading AI portfolio.

Our NVIDIA [indiscernible] GB300 product line now have more than $13 billion in back orders, including the largest deal in our 32-year history, reflecting the tremendous growth potential in hyperscale and enterprise deployments. The B300 platforms are also gaining strong traction following the success of our B200 products as we continue to serve as the leading supplier. As noted in our pre-announcement, approximately $1.5 billion in revenue shift from the September quarter to December quarter due to last-minute configuration upgrade from our customers with expanded volume. This shift were largely caused by the complexity of these new GPU racks, which requires intricate integration, testing and validation, making them more time consuming to source and build.

With production now quickly ramp up, these adjustments have eventually strengthened our growth trajectory and support an even higher full year outlook. Our product portfolio continues to lead the industry. In addition to NVIDIA GB300 and B300, we are shipping RTX Pro 6000, V200MVNO4 and AMDMI350355X platforms in volume to power generative AI large language model inference and HPC workloads. To continue technology leadership in AI platforms, we are preparing for the NVIDIA VolalLubin and AMD Helios launches in calendar 2026.

Edge AI solutions are also gaining more traction for real-time processing in manufacturing, telecom, retail and autonomous environments. We are deeply focused on training LLM and generative AI, we also see rapid growth in industry-specific model, agentic AI, broader infancy and AI at the edge. With that, we are seeing accelerating demand across cloud, enterprise and so as they upgrade and expand the data centers for AI. Our DC DBS helps customers accelerate and optimize customers' transformation.

BCBBS is critical to our future success, enabling rapid plenty design and deployment of AI data center and AI factory, while optimizing performance and minimize power consumption through our advanced and DLC 2 technologies and high vision subsystem. Supermicro building -- now go beyond service system and recalculation it's optimizing the entire data center for customers. With product life cycle completion from 18 to 24 months to as short as 12 months. Customers need rapid innovation, deployment and time to online BCBBS delivers re-scale propane service, storage, BLIC systems and 2 heat exchangers, power share, battery backup for water towers, dry towers, network and capability management software and services.

We have begun shipping BCBBS orders to some key customers and expect many more data centers to follow suit. This solution is becoming a critical part of our business strategy, driving future growth and profitability. We are investing now and over the next few quarters, we will share more detail on our expanding DCBBS portfolio and upcoming release. To mean that this unprecedent demand. Supermicro is executing an aggressive global expansion. Our silicon value facility remained a foundation of U.S. operation, delivering time to market, quality and security for customers.

We have quickly expanded our footprint in [ Sunosi ] recently. And our soon added new North America sites to support the growing requirement for major CSP and NCPs. This investment underscores our commitment to amenitize innovation, job creation and supply chain desires. Internationally, new production facility in Taiwan, the Netherlands, Malaysia and soon on the Middle East are coming online to enlarge our production capacity, enhancing cost competitiveness and meet regional sovereign AI requirements.

With 52 megawatts of power capacity in place. We are on track to scale production to 6,000 recs per month, including 3,000 LLC -- within this fiscal year. While these expansion require out form investment, they are critical to sustain long-term growth and deliver performance PTO time to online and costly recency at scale.

In summary, Super Micro is developing into a leading AI platform and data center in structure total solution company. While we continue to grow our server storage drag and IoT systems. Our BCBBS delivers unique advantages that set us apart are designed to reduce customer deployment, complexity, excellent time to market, time to online and lower total cost of ownership, combined with our broad supply chain, deep customer relationship and expanding partner ecosystem, this capability positions us to become the leading data center infrastructure [indiscernible] company.

Recent large-scale orders and continue investment in customers, products, people and our processes put us firmly on the hand -- competition remains intense. We are focused on capturing tremendous AI infastructure market share, some large-scale builds and pressure margin in the near term. But our scale, innovation and differentiation, differentiated BCBBS offerings strengthen our market leadership and position us to deliver long-term profitability and shareholder value. Looking ahead, we expect to ship at least $10.5 billion in the December quarter, depending on the supply and production capability readiness.

We anticipate a sequential growth through fiscal 2026, giving us confidence in achieving at least $36 billion in revenue for the year. This is a truly unique time for Super Micro and I am super excited about the opportunity ahead. I look forward to sharing our progress with you next quarter. Thank you. Now I will turn it over to David.

Thank you, Charles. Q1 fiscal year 2026 revenue was $5 billion, down 15% year-over-year and down 13% quarter-over-quarter. Compared to our guidance, of $6 billion to $7 billion. We had a record level of new orders exceeding $13 billion, but a customer's custom rack platform upgrade for a recent large design win and customer logistics factors delayed some shipments to Q2. We expect customer demand to remain robust for the remainder of fiscal year 2026.

AI GPU platforms, which represented over 75% of Q1 revenues continue to be the key growth driver. During Q1, the enterprise channel revenues totaled $1.5 billion representing 31% of revenues versus 36% in the prior quarter. This was down 51% year-over-year and down 25% quarter-over-quarter. The OEM appliance and large data center segment revenues were $3.4 billion, representing 68% of Q1 revenues versus 63% in the last quarter. Up 25% year-over-year and down 6% quarter-over-quarter. The emerging 5G telco edge IoT segment contributed the remaining 1% of Q1 revenues.

For Q1 fiscal year 2016, we had 2 10%-plus customers. By geography, the U.S. represented 37% of Q1 revenues; Asia, 46%; Europe, 14%; and the rest of the world, 3%. On a year-over-year basis, U.S. revenues decreased 57%, while Asia grew 143%. Europe increased 11% and the rest of the world increased 56%. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, U.S. revenues declined 16%, Asia decreased 4%, Europe decreased 16% and the rest of the world declined 48%.

Asia grew significantly on a year-over-year basis as an existing U.S.-based customer opened a large data center in Asia. Q1 non-GAAP gross margin was 9.5% versus 9.6% in Q4. Q1 GAAP operating expenses were $285 million, down 10% quarter-over-quarter and up 7% year-over-year. On a non-GAAP basis, operating expenses were $203 million, which was down 15% quarter-over-quarter and down 2% year-over-year. Operating expenses were down quarter-over-quarter due to high marketing expense reimbursements and lower discrete R&D expenses. Non-GAAP operating margin for Q1 and was 5.4% compared to 5.3% in Q4. Other income and expense in Q1 totaled a net income of $26.3 million, reflecting $51.2 million in interest income on higher cash balances and FX-related gains, partially offset by $24.9 million in interest expense, primarily related to convertible notes.

The tax provision for Q1 was $40 million on a GAAP basis and $59 million on a non-GAAP basis, resulting in a GAAP tax rate of 19.3% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 20%. The Q1 GAAP diluted EPS was $0.26 compared to guidance of $0.30 to 42% -- $0.42 and non-GAAP diluted EPS was 35% versus guidance of $0.40 to $0.52. The GAAP fully diluted share count increased sequentially from $625 million in Q4 to $663 million in Q1. And the non-GAAP share count increased from $638 million to $677 million over the same period. Cash flow used in operations for Q1 was $918 million PAUSE compared to cash flow generated from operations of $864 million in the prior quarter. Q1 operating cash flow was impacted by lower net income and higher accounts receivable and higher inventory levels as we prepared for a strong Q2 with higher working capital needs.

Q1 closing inventory was $5.7 billion, which was up from $4.7 billion in Q4. CapEx for Q1 totaled $32 million, resulting in negative free cash flow of $950 million for the quarter. During the quarter, we executed a $1.8 billion AR facility that enables the nonrecourse sale of certain qualified accounts receivable, providing flexibility to strengthen our working capital on a discretionary basis. At quarter end, our cash position totaled $4.2 billion, while bank and convertible note debt was $4.8 billion, resulting in a net cash -- in a net debt position of $575 million, compared to a net cash position of $412 million in the prior quarter.

Turning to the balance sheet and working capital metrics. The Q1 cash conversion cycle was 123 days compared to 96 days in Q4. Days of inventory increased by 30 days to 105 days versus 75 days in the prior quarter. Days sales outstanding increased by 5 days to 43 days versus 38 days in Q4, while days payables outstanding increased by 9 days to 26 days versus 17 days in Q4.

Now turning to the outlook for Q2 fiscal year 2016. We expect net sales in the range of $10 billion to $11 billion. GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.37 to $0.45 and non-GAAP diluted net income per share of $0.46 to $0.54. We expect gross margins to be down 300 basis points, relative to Q1 fiscal year '26 levels. Given the fast-moving dynamics in the end markets, we wanted to provide the framework of the factors impacting our gross margins.

First, customer and product mix, including a strategic Q1 large design win, which includes higher cost and a lower margin as we ramp a new mega-scale GB300-optimized RAC platform. And second, we are making greater investments with new customers to ensure their success with additional AI engineering support and services. To drive future growth, we believe that our investment in supporting these customers is leading to other large global design wins. Our long-term goal is to expand revenues in higher-margin segments such as data center building block solutions, emerging global CSPs, sovereign mega projects, enterprise data centers, IoT and telco solutions and software service offerings.

We do expect to benefit from some economies of scale driven by higher revenue levels, a cost-effective global manufacturing footprint, including our Malaysia facility and continued customer diversification. As we complete this mega cluster, we expect to leverage these investments and are establishing the most advanced AI service capabilities in the market. As we go through this transition, we expect our gross margins to improve. GAAP operating expenses are expected to be around $326 million in Q2, which includes approximately $76 million and stock-based compensation expenses that are excluded from non-GAAP operating expenses. The outlook for Q2 of fiscal year 2026, fully diluted GAAP EPS includes approximately $64 million in expected stock-based compensation expenses, net of tax effects of $18 million, which are excluded from non-GAAP diluted net income per common share. We expect other income and expenses, including interest expense, to result in a net expense of approximately $27 million.

The company's projections for Q2 fiscal year 2016 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted net income per common share assume a GAAP tax rate of 15.6% and a non-GAAP tax rate of 16.8% and a fully diluted share count of $666 million for GAAP and $680 million shares for non-GAAP. And Capital expenditures for Q2 is expected to be in the range of $60 million to $80 million. For the full fiscal year 2026, we are raising our outlook to a net sales of at least $36 billion versus prior guidance of at least $33 billion. Michael, we're now ready for Q&A.

Great. Matt, take some questions.

[Operator Instructions] First question is from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan.

This is MP on for Samik Chatterjee. I just wanted to ask my first question on the PAUSE the revised guidance between like availability of chipsets and market share expansion. What do you think is the more of a driver for increased revenue guidance?

Yes, NVIDIA, a we Altran is getting available. So we are PAUSE receiving more and more allocation from them and preparing for a huge volume to ramp up start from this quarter. That's why this quarter, we estimate at least PAUSE $10.5 billion. And looking forward, I mean, without DC BBS, we will focus on both. One is continue move higher revenue. The other PAUSE direction is move more value to the market and in data center put solution with our BCBBS.

As a follow-up, I just wanted to ask on DCB BS. Like I think you already started shipping those solutions. And like when do you think the DC BBS will become material enough to actually impact the gross margins? And then my other question is, like, are you -- any thoughts on initial feedback from customers? And then also any thoughts on the competition, which you are seeing relative to.

Yes, thank you for the question. Yes, DCP have been very welcome. We have some current large accounts already older some were the key BCBBS components. And we expect more and more customers will commit to our BCBBS. The idea of like what we share is to speed up customer to deploy, build a data center, save their time to online. And also make our more efficient, save money over build more solid data center. And the profit margin will sell a much higher in the industry for data center infrastructure. Basically, the business is more than 20% of margin, and we are very excited for that product line to be getting available. And I believe it's a well population.

Next question is from the line of Asiya Merchant with Citigroup. PAUSE.

Great. PAUSE The order pipeline that you guys talked about is pretty strong. And so if you can help us understand what's the components that are contributing to such a strong order outlook that you have embedded into your guidance? And if I may, you guys talked a little bit about -- or about this revenue guide that you guys are exceeding sequential growth expected post fiscal 2Q. If you can just also help us understand how we should think about gross margins as we proceed through the year and the OpEx to support such a strong revenue outlook.

Yes. I mean, GPU, for sure, contributed most revenue kind of like the backward and Kindle AMD 350, 355 and breakaway of B3 and RPX, right? So indeed, a lot of strong product line are driving our revenue. And at the same time, again, for the best interest to our customers, we try to provide data center end-to-end solution, including DC including management software, on-site deployment and service. So to put in a one-stop shopping for customers' advantage and also grow our profit margin. And David, you may add assumption for a long term.

Sure. Yes. So on the gross margin question, we are -- we're going into a quarter where we are ramping 1 of the largest clusters in the world. We're ramping a new a new product line at mega scale. And so therefore, we're being a little conservative on the margin because we will have a higher cost as we ramp production and shipment. So we're just giving guidance for 1 quarter out, but we did mention that as we go out throughout future quarters, we're expecting to improve for the reasons that we laid out. On the OpEx side, you can tell from looking at our -- historically, we are that sub-5% OpEx, and we expect that to continue. But we will continue to increase our OpEx in order to strengthen our infrastructure.

Yes. I'll let you add to more areas. Yes. One area is traditionally, our revenue was about $5 billion to $6 billion quarterly. And now we are growing to $10 billion quarterly. So that, for sure, increase short-term challenge. And that's why we had to leverage U.S.A., Taiwan, Malaysia facility. And that kind of involved hiring lots of new people turn out people and add facility. But once this much higher capacity facility already in this quarter, December quarter, we will be able to service large customers in U.S.A., in Asia and Europe, truly global major supplier.

And by that time, for sure, our resource leverage will become much more efficient. PAUSE And second is our DCBBS is getting mature and getting ready to service more customers to put in more value to customers, and that I believe we have grown our profitability.

That's great. If I could just on the orders that you talked about, $13 billion, I know you provided at the chip-set level. I think I was looking for just customers that are constituting that $13 billion? If you can just share some insights into how percentage of customers that are in there that contributed to such a strong order book or $13 billion. Thank you.

So they constitute some of the best customers in the world. I'll say that. We had 2 10% customers this year, we ended last year with 4 10% customers. We always welcome new large customers. And -- but we don't have any -- we usually don't talk specifically about individual customers.

Yes. But they are really high-profile high-value partner for long term. That's why we do such a big effort to greatly increase our capacity to support them. There are some of them. So we are very happy to enhance the support to low -- high value partner.

Next question is from the line of Ananda Baruah with Luke Capital..

A couple, if I could. Charles, the midpoint of the guide for December is $10.5 billion. And the guide for -- the update you got for the fiscal year is at least $36 billion. So if I model out $10.5 billion for each March and June, I get sort of just over $36 billion. You're talking about a lot of $13 billion in GB 300 product wins, a lot of good activity going forward.

So I guess my question, Charles, is -- first 1 is, are you being conservative? Is there conservatism baked in to the implied March and June quarters? Or should we expect some flattening out of revenue in the coming quarters? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. Thank you for the question. Yes, this is the first time we grow our revenue to about more than $10 billion a quarter. So we are very excited about it. So now we already extend -- expand our capacity global and train our people and have all our facilities ready. So from now on, we are ready to be really big supplier around the world. And with Blackwell getting mature and ERA quality, everything is promising at the last moment. And so we feel very excited to have at least $36 billion. And hopefully, it's a very conservative number.

And at the same time, we are doing our best to grow our DC BBS total solution because that's unique data center infrastructure tool to help customers build a data center quicker, better, save energy and save money. So overall, I believe with BCBBS become more mature, our profitability will improve.

And Charles, you -- I know we're talking fiscal year we're talking fiscal year expectations. But do you anticipate the strength to continue through the calendar year? There's been a lot of large deals with NeoCloud announced lately with large AI labs and hyperscalers, and that's your sweet spot customer base than NeoCloud. So should we anticipate this kind of strength without giving me a guide, but PAUSE could the strength continue through the balance of the calendar year.

Yes. Indeed, our capacity is in diving scale now, as you know, right? So $36 billion is a very conservative number. So we believe we will continue to grow quickly, continue to lead the market. We'll use not just technology, but also market share.

I appreciate that. Mike, just 1 quick clarification with David here. David, just to your prior comments about gross margin improvement through the year, is that to say that December quarter is the low watermark gross margin quarter for the fiscal year?

Yes. is fair. We are -- as I mentioned, this is a quarter of first impression for us on standing doubling our revenues in 1 quarter. And so we're doing everything we can to improve our margin, but we're not making forecast out beyond December quarter.

Next question is from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

David, can you remind us how much total revenue can your manufacturing footprint support today? And when it's fully utilized, what would that number be -- at what point do you decide to add more capacity, such as adding a new plant? And if you can weave in any update to the Malaysia plant, is that now building racks? And what's the status of that plant? And I have a follow-up.

Okay. So maybe I'll let Charles talk about capacity, but we've mentioned that we have a rack capacity of 6,000 racks per month worldwide. And so I don't think that we have spoken as to what that value is. But I can say that Malaysia, we are starting to stand up more in terms of their production, and we expect it to contribute greatly going forward. let me see, did I answer what are the questions did I miss there?

Yes. I guess we try to be very, very conservative. Because with Black way Altra is still brand new, right? So we had to make sure we ship exactly the best quality, the most reliable system to customer. And that's why we spend a lot of time to burn in our solution. And that's why we build up such a huge capacity. It will time 3,000 like cooling power per month and time 12 months year and each right, for example, $3 million. So the number is more than $100 billion. So yes, if everything moves, our capacity is that $100 billion range now.

But we try to be conservative and try to design carefully, burning carefully, make sure all the product we deliver to the market. exactly the pace in the market.

And as a follow-up, David, can I ask? You have this large project ramping over the next several quarters. How should we think about working capital and cash conversion cycle and free cash flow? And at what point would you need to tap the markets to raise more capital?

Yes. So we've maintained about $5 billion on average. And obviously, when you double your revenues, that's not going to be enough working capital. So as we announced, we did put an accounts receivable sales program in place, which allows us to factor our receivables up to $1.8 billion. And we're also -- we also have other programs that are being put into place to meet our needs over the upcoming quarters. So we have no doubts about our ability to execute on those programs.

Yes, to a -- we definitely have a capability to service more customers with a much higher volume, but we will control the revenue based on our cash flow.

Next question is from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland.

Yes. Thank you. Great demand there and understandable that wrapping up a new customer on the V-300. But I guess, I think it was maybe a year ago, 1.5 years ago that it became apparent that you guys were helping XAI losses Class 1 ramp up. And that was dilutive to margins at that point in time. The rationale was to get the lighthouse customer and demonstrate the Super Micro's engineering capabilities. Why is it necessary to basically do a rent to repeat of this proof of Super Micro's engineering prowess.

X AI, for sure, a very good partner. And whenever we have a chance, we try to work with them to learn some things from them and to offer our face service. So yes, ex AI will continue to be our important partner for long term. And again, our capacity is huge and capability is much bigger now, but we will be selective to grow our revenue based on our cash flow.

And Nehal, what I would add is that what we are doing is that we are validating each time as we did 1.5 years ago and now that we're the premier provider of advanced DC BBS solutions and AI data centers. So we gladly stepped into that role, and we continue to get additional business each quarter as a result of these successful installations.

Next question is from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company.

This is Shay Mowali on for Quinn. My first question is on gross margin. I know you guys mentioned new facilities coming online and that possibly being a PL1 for your gross margin over time. So we're just wondering if we can get some more color here on the timing and maybe just the overall impact of the new facilities would have.

Yes. As you know, either we need to invest in Malaysia and Taiwan in U.S.A. over location. So make sure we have enough capacity to bring the best quality product, most optimal to the market. PAUSE So in December quarter, we spent a lot of money to establish foundation. And going forward, now we have those capacity and capability. to grow much larger scale business.

Great. And then my follow-up is on the Super Micro federal program you guys announced in the quarter. was just curious if we can get some more color on this program? And maybe what led to the creation of it and how this initiative could position Supermicro for government contracts going forward?

Yes, we are USA company and have designed manufacturer service from Silicon Valley. So federal business ship sweep for us. And now we have more talent and service in a customer relationship in or they kind of support. So that's why we officially initiate fatal program

Next question is from the line of John Tanwanteng with CGS Securities.

I wanted to expand on the prior question on just the case study with Valassis last year and how you took the margin hit to land that customer and validating new technologies. Apparently you're doing it at this time with the bigger customer and at a lower margin. So I guess the question is, philosophically, I'm not asking for margin guidance, but how do you expect to grow the margin going forward from here?

And like how do you prevent that from happening again? Have you seen that stronger margin from follow-on orders from the customers that you have validated your technologies to? Or is that still something that is on the comp or has it been possible in this environment for whatever reason?

So there are several different initiatives. One, John, as you know, we get leverage off of the additional business that we have. We also, as we've mentioned, are pursuing manufacturing in other geographies in order to serve local customers, which we believe will also lower costs -- we also have added on data center building block solution strategies, which we try to outline on every call and the expansion of business.

But it's really, as I mentioned earlier, it's the success and the market share that we're taking that are bringing a lot of emerging, not only existing companies from around the world, but also -- and sovereigns, but also new and emerging CSPs and Neo clouds and other companies, enterprises coming to us because they recognize the Super Micro name. So we expect that, that will overall raise our margin profile and so we're doing everything we can to raise our margins. But yet, we still want to be the premier provider of DC BBS solutions. And so we think that we have a good strategy in that regard.

Okay. And just to clarify, have you seen the higher margins from customers where you maybe gave them better pricing or put you on investment into the initial orders as you get follow-on orders and repeat business from them.

Yes. So every -- different customers have different margin profiles based on the amount of design that the Super Micro does for their solution. as well as the size of the order that they're placing. So as in any business, customer ordering $1 billion of product is different from a customer ordering $10 billion of product in terms of pricing strategy. So therefore, we're very happy that the customers that we have brought into the Super Micro portfolio of customers is really adding a lot of name value to our brand. And so that's what we're very pleased about. We're gaining market share. there's no question about that.

Got it. If I could sneak in 1 more. Just how are you accounting for the risk of further pushouts in the revenue outlook for the year, just given you've had a couple of high-profile ones already? PAUSE.

Yes. So the timing of it -- whenever you're dealing with very large projects, it's not always easy to fit deliveries into 1 3-month time frame. And there are all sorts of -- I mean if you take a look at the thousands and thousands of parts we have to bring together to build our solutions. And also on the customer side, the things that they're having to do to get their data centers ready there's a lot of logistics that have to take place. It doesn't always line up perfectly with our quarter ends. So we've said, as we continue to take large customers, it's going to be -- there's going to be things beyond our control which includes customer readiness, which includes supply chain issues and et cetera, that will -- that may impact quarter-to-quarter results. But if you look at last quarter, or if you look at the last 2 years, we went from $7.5 billion to $15 billion to $22 billion, okay?

So that trend did not stop. We were adding $7 billion for the last 2 years, each year. Now did those quarters all line up perfectly according to our plan, our annual plan? Not always. But the trend is still there. And we've increased our PAUSE our revenues as well as our profits. And that's what we intend to continue to do.

Next question is from the line of Mark Newman with Bernstein.

So very encouraging to hear about the PAUSE large orders, $13 billion order you mentioned. Just curious, though, there's not a lot of historical data on orders or backlog. And any color you can give on the size of the backlog of orders or how $13 billion compared to previous quarters. Just trying to understand that what's the size of the which we've got guidance on from some of your competitors in the past. And another follow-up question on gross margins as well.

Okay. So first, I'll answer that, your first question on historical data. We've -- it's been our practice not to talk about backlog we couldn't help but talk about the orders that we receive, the new orders that we received, new design wins because they did have some impacts in both the current quarter as well as the December quarter. And so we're speaking to those. But we're not -- we don't talk generally about backlog. So I'll take your second question on gross margin.

So gross margins, I mean I know you're trying to stay away from long-term guide, but previously, I believe you've talked about this 15% to 16% long-term target for gross margins. Is that still intact but pushed out or -- is that now not up for perhaps? Just curious what's the thinking on that?

Yes. Back in 2000 -- I think in 2021, we came out with a 14% to 17% gross margin guide. That's probably what you're referring to as a long-term target. The market has changed. And so we, in fact, we're right in the middle of a change right now as we move on to some new very new dynamic platforms. And so we will give margin guidance as we can see it clearly. We're doing our best to raise margins in a very competitive landscape. Yes, we would love to be back in double digits. But we'll give guidance when we can see it clearly.

And hopefully, it's not too far away. Indeed, we focus more on DC BBS and enterprise account, then double digital is easy for us. But at the same time, we are very interested to support a large-scale CSP as well. And so far, it looks like it's a great chance for us to service large CSP customers as well. With large CSP customer and BC PBS and the price together, our revenue will continue to grow very fast. And double-digit gross margin still in our plan is just take a little bit longer.

Final question is from the line of Brandon Nispel with KeyBanc.

Thanks for squeezing in taking the question. I think echoing the same comments around gross margins that looking at the guidance, it really implies 0% contribution margin. And so I think revenue growth is great, but I was hoping you could really help us understand what's on the other side of this, right, in terms of Help us understand what this business looks like from like a free cash flow contribution standpoint, as you guys scale it, because you can't just keep going down the path of lower and lower gross margins, especially when the revenue coming in, is that a 0% contribution margin, again, based on the midpoint of your guys' guidance?

So again, we believe that we can't name all of our customers, but I can tell you that we are bringing in some of the best companies in the world. And we believe that our first-to-market practice of being able to bring reliable and optimize solutions quickly to market will reward us well. And this has been our practice over the last 32 years.

And so we've consistently been first to market we have shown that we can grow quicker than the market at large. And we've also shown that we can bring customized solutions, which bring very good margins and very good returns to the bottom line. So we're staying with our game plan right now, the market is going through some new cycles with new kind of exciting new platforms coming out. We believe that this will pay off. So we're staying the course.

Keep our bottom line. Make sure, we keep our bottom line, make sure we continue to make more total profit every quarter, every year. With that as the phase for sure, when we have a chance to grow more market share, we try to grow more market share as well. But bottom line is mature every quarter, every year, we make more total profit.

Got it. And David, are there any like onetime costs with the design wins and the upgrade pushouts that fell into this quarter in terms of like onetime costs that you're absorbing in this quarter's gross margin guidance?

So you're -- in terms of the December quarter, yes, there are -- there's a lot of additional engineering costs and expedite costs and overtime costs that result from delivering kind of what would be twice our normal revenue run rate and scaling a new technology at what we believe would be 1 of the largest clusters in the world. So yes, there are a lot of extra costs that go into that and that we don't -- that we believe will actually prepare us for the upcoming quarters?

Yes. It's basically our first GiGA project. And hopefully, we can make it perfectly company. Understood.

There are no additional questions waiting at this time. So I'll pass the conference back to the management team for any closing remarks..

Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

That concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.