All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us at the 54th Annual TD Cowen TMT Conference. Before we go any further, I think I'm contractually obligated to remind you that Extel voting is open. If you appreciate the work that either of us up here on stage do, please lend your support. With that out of the way, we have Nick Aberle from Astera Labs, VP of Finance and IR, and thanks for joining us.
Appreciate it, John. Thank you very much, and thanks to TD Cowen for having us. I would vote for you guys. You guys do some really good work, so we appreciate your support.
Appreciate that. Let's just dive in. Starting off, near-term environment, we're about a month removed from you guys reporting a pretty solid set of results. Maybe just start by highlighting the key points that investors should be focused on there, whether it's mix or strong outlook, what should we be keying in on? Maybe if you want to take it more broadly, how does that fit in the context of who is Astera and how do you deliver for your customers?
Yeah, got it. I would say in terms of the near term, yeah, we've obviously been on a nice run the last couple of quarters. We had good results, guided for a bit of an acceleration, to the growth rate in Q2, and pretty optimistic about continued inflection of growth going into the back half of the year. Nothing really new to report relative to a month ago. I think as everybody knows, demand continues to be very robust from a secular standpoint. I think most importantly for Astera and what we're trying to accomplish is really building out this connectivity backbone for the industry. In order to be able to do that, we need to be able to broaden and diversify and grow our portfolio to be able to service and support customers in a variety of different ways.
What you've seen from us over the last several years is a diversification and an expansion of the product portfolio beyond our core IO connectivity products like Aries and Taurus into more complex solutions like our Leo CXL Memory Controller, and then most recently the Scorpio Smart Fabric Switch portfolio, which addresses both scale-out and scale-up market opportunities. Taking a step back, the name of the game really for us is there's tens of millions of accelerators that will ultimately ship annually over the course of the next couple of years, and we want to be able to staple as many dollars to every one of those accelerators that goes out the door as we can. If you go back to around the time of IPO, Aries attached maybe $50-$100 worth of content per accelerator.
When you started to layer in the scale-up piece of Aries, you expanded that by 2X, because of the higher attach rates. Taurus started to layer into the model as well for scale-out, driving that number up overall to several hundred dollars of content. With Scorpio P-Series adding several hundred dollars of more content, X-Series bumping that whole thing up to about $1,000 in total. In a very relatively short period of time, we've gone from sub $100 of content per XPU or GPU, to upwards of $1,000. As we think about growing the business and expanding the business going forward, it's going to be layering on additional parts of the portfolio from a connectivity standpoint to continue to grow that $1,000 up much higher than that.
I think that's a perfect summary and a good setup, why don't we just go through the star signs. Starting with Scorpio, maybe specifically on Scorpio X-Series, I think it would be fair to say that that's likely to drive a significant portion of the ramp here in the back half of the year. Maybe just throw it to you and say, well, first off, is that accurate? Second is, what are the points of risk on that? To the upside or downside, are there technical steppingstones still left or is this just we're going to hit the knee in the curve and you're going to ship from inventory and from your partners?
I would say at a high level, Scorpio X-Series of course is going to be a great catalyst for the top line for the remainder of this year and even into 2027 as we diversify and broaden across incremental customers as well. All businesses are growing for us. If we look at the growth rate sequentially into Q2, we're seeing growth across every single one of our product lines into Q3, Q4, and into next year. We expect every single product line to continue to grow as well. This is a function of secular trends, more accelerators going out the door, more platforms, more racks being shipped, but also higher attach rates, next generation solutions, driving higher ASPs and higher content on a per product basis. Every single one of these pieces is driving and contributing to growth.
With that being said, as you brought up, Scorpio X-Series is a big piece of that puzzle. You have a market opportunity just for Scorpio X-Series of $10 billion plus, which is almost half of our total addressable market. Clearly there the content, the ASPs are extremely rich, so they can drive and move the needle a lot more than some of the other pieces of the portfolio. Scorpio X-Series has been in the works for a long period of time, so it's not something that just has come onto the scene recently. We've been shipping pre-production volumes of Scorpio X-Series back in the second half of 2025. We moved into early volume production in Q1. We've expanded the portfolio now to include both smaller radix and larger radix solutions, of which those are shipping in Q2 as well. Of course, there's always going to be milestones.
Volume deployment is not an easy task when you're talking about extremely complex systems and platforms with thousands of components and many accelerators all needing to scale up and work perfectly together in unison. Tons of work still always being done. Very confident about where we stand today, and Scorpio X-Series will be a nice driver for us in the back half.
Yes. I think in a similar way, you've talked about Taurus likely to be a contributor to growth this year in maybe a more material way than it has been, or I guess, maybe was last year as your main customer ramps 800G. I feel like taking both a near and a longer-term view on the AEC market for Ethernet. We have a lot of debate amongst us investors about whether or not AEC are dead at pick your line rate 1.6T, 3.2T. Yet, that's in the context of we're not even now ramping 800G.
Correct.
Maybe just talk about where we are in the AEC life cycle, is that a durable market for you that you see as a longer term, or is that sort of a, stopgap's a terrible word to use here, but before we move to a more optical-focused ecosystem?
Yeah. I think at the highest level, our view is that the optical opportunity within scale-out or scale-up is incremental and additive to our copper opportunity. You've heard many in our industry, just as recently as the last couple of months, talk about copper having very long life cycle and based upon the characteristics that it brings in terms of power, reliability, cost, that it's going to continue to be a preferred use case for wherever you can manage to get the length that you need or the reach that you need out of it.
When you talk about Ethernet-based AEC, for example, or in particular, you've seen the growth of that market really be driven by physics such that speeds continue to go up, distances kind of continue to stretch, and you've needed active solutions versus passive solutions in order to kind of bridge the gap on these connections. You've seen the market opportunity for AEC kind of grow as a function of these secular and technological trends. We believe that's still in the early stages as well. To your point, as we're just on the cusp of moving to 800G and ultimately 1.6T behind that, there's still a tremendous amount of passive copper opportunity to kind of take share from in the marketplace. We would expect just the market overall to continue to grow over the next several generations.
Overall, we're excited about not just that, but also optical. I'm sure we're going to talk about that in a little bit as well. But yeah, for us, Taurus is going to continue to be a good driver of growth. We see the market growing overall, and then we see ourselves expanding into additional customers as well to kind of broaden our reach there on the customer side.
Great. On the other active copper side, on the PCIe side, Aries was, as you mentioned, sort of the flagship for Astera when you guys came public. By my estimates, and maybe this is too high, continues to drive maybe 60% of revenue even in the early stages of this year.
Yep.
We're now 10 minutes in, and we're only talking about it for the first time.
Yep.
How should we be thinking about Aries both this year and longer term as it almost mechanically has to shrink as an overall share of your revenue, but maybe is still growing internally quite nicely?
Yeah. Yeah, you bring up a pretty good point. In 2025, Aries portfolio grew by roughly 70% year-over-year, which is not too shabby of a growth rate, but came down dramatically as a percentage of revenue. It used to be 90%+ of our revenue and yeah, I think your kind of 2/3 number is in the ballpark of where we stand today. We've seen tremendous growth, but everything else is growing faster and it kind of goes back to that kind of core theme that I was talking about earlier. Our ability to grow has really been driven by development, expansion of the portfolio, bringing new products to market. Not just new products, but products that carry higher ASP and higher content opportunities. Aries has got a great story ahead of it.
We're just in the early stages of transitioning to PCI Express Gen 6. We talked about that being a little bit of over a third of our total revenue in the Q1 timeframe. Not aware of anybody else shipping any PCI Express Gen 6 product in volume today. We continue to feel very confident in our market position. For Gen 6, on the PCI Express side, both for scale-out and scale-up, you'll see a higher ASP on a like-for-like basis on or about 20% generation over generation. We also expect to see higher attach rates in general. Again, kind of going back to that physics problem where speeds are going up, speeds have doubled again, and you're going to need retimers in places you didn't need them before.
We expect to see very healthy growth rates for Aries in 2026, and then follow that with the 2027 as well. We continue to be very bullish about PCI Express Retimers.
This is a curve ball I didn't prep Nick for. Is the dynamic with Aries maybe that it moves from the, as the scale-up domains move to optics, the physics on the scale-out or front end dictate that Aries maybe becomes much more prevalent in the use of Retimers for PCIe where you would, as you just mentioned, you previously don't need a Retimers to get from the CPU to the BMC or whatever?
Correct.
Is that where we should think about Aries starting to move into, call it 2027 plus?
Yeah, I would say yeah. The attach rates on that scale-out or head node connectivity domain where you're connecting between CPUs, GPUs, storage, memory, networking, all of that is going to continue to be wired by PCI Express. PCI Express is going to continue to evolve and provide faster speeds, and even though those traces aren't getting a ton longer, it's still going to be trickier to get from each endpoint to endpoint. We do expect to see, in that domain, a higher attach rate of PCI Express Retimers. For scale-up, I think that market's still going to be a very nice opportunity for us as well.
We'll talk about optical in a second, but as you start to get to multi-rack and you need to go over seven meters and you need to go hopping two, three racks over, you start to need an optical solution. You can't use copper or PCI Express. That'll be an additive market opportunity that we'll try to prosecute. Certainly a lot of opportunities still for PCI Express on the scale-up side as well. The last thing that I would point out is we continue to talk about 10+ customers for scale-up for Scorpio X-Series, of which we talked about the lead customer and how that's going to ramp, and that's great.
There's a whole slew of incremental PCI Express opportunities for X-Series, that will pull through PCI Express Retimer business as well, both for scale-up as well as scale-out. We're excited about those opportunities as well.
Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about optical. You guys have talked about sort of the 2028 timeframe, where that scale-up will start to flip, appreciating that, especially as we've seen with NVIDIA and Google, how they are sort of deploying a hybrid copper optical scale-up domain.
Yep.
We'd assume that will look similar. You guys made it a public investment, aiXscale, I think I said that right. I think what many, including myself, have failed to appreciate is what you guys have been doing behind the scenes on sort of getting your EIC and PIC portfolios ready and really heavily investing, not in a M&A style, but in an R&D style to be ready for this optical transition. Maybe you could just vamp on that.
Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. We've been at it for at least a couple of years now on the optical side, putting together the team, gathering the resources, and trying to build out the roadmap of how to attack this market opportunity. Of course, as with everything that we do, a lot of this is done in very close, in concert with our customers. We understand their roadmaps, their timing, what challenges that we need to be solving for in the next two to three years, whether it's copper or optical. We do see opportunities to kind of intercept on the optical side with the products that are in development for us currently. I think that you'll see over the course of the next several quarters, us continue to lay out very finite signposts about our progress and how we're heading down this track.
We've talked about generating optical-based revenue in 2027, both from the fiber coupler on a standalone basis and from NPO applications as well. Kind of stay tuned for that, but that's on the horizon for growth in 2027. Yeah, there's a fair amount of complexity with what we're trying to do from a roadmap standpoint. The XScale acquisition for us was very meaningful. As we've been doing our research and homework and discussing with customers over the last couple of years, this coupler technology, it's a little bit more of an art than a science, something that's outside of our typical kind of capability and flow. It made sense to go acquire it.
We were attracted to that because it was a solution that is probably not talked about as much as the EIC and the PIC, but something that's very meaningful and influential to the overall scalability of the overall optical engine. That's an important piece that will be sold as a standalone component. We've talked about a leading AI infrastructure provider building that into their CPO solution that will be ramped next year. We're excited about shipping just that standalone piece into volume. There will be another step as we move towards the back half of next year where NPO becomes an application that we can begin to address. Jitendra and Sanjay have been talking about building out our analog mixed-signal capabilities. We'll have new products that will be able to address that part of the market.
Those products will be integrated into an EIC piece that will ultimately drive our own PIC as well. All of that development is being done in-house organically currently. There is a packaging and a test and a manufacturing flow that is very complex as well, that kind of brings all this together and allows you to deploy an optical engine at scale as well, and that's all being worked on as well. Tremendous amount of work being done on that front. The expectation is that the end of the road will have an optical engine that we can bolt around Scorpio X and create our own CPO solution to provide to customers. That optical engine can ultimately be used on the other side of the link as well and be integrated around a customer's AI accelerator as well.
We want to be in a position where we can provide full link accountability across the entire domain. Those are some of the pieces that we're driving towards. Of course, we'll announce more formal products and get a little bit deeper on exactly what we're doing, how we're differentiated, what the market size is. I would just say tremendous amount of work being done, and it's a big market opportunity.
Yeah, and I think one of the things that Jitendra's talked about as well is that you're looking to be photonics agnostic. Maybe you could talk about what that exactly means, because I don't know that just those two words make a lot of sense to me without going deeper, but maybe you can just talk about how you're fitting into your customers' plans and roadmaps.
I think that what we've discovered in conversations with customers and in our engagements is that certain customers have a certain religion around photonic ICs, what modulation to use, different features, and functionalities that are going to be priorities to their systems and their workloads that they're trying to operate. From our perspective, again, I think as you've seen probably across our entire portfolio and how we manage this, is we want to provide customers optionality. We want to support flexibility. To the extent that a hyperscaler customer would want to use their own specific photonic IC for whatever reason that they might want to do that, we're building the rest of the puzzle in an agnostic manner to be able to incorporate and leverage that PIC.
We'll have our own organic PIC technology as well, so that will be offered and hopefully utilized broadly as well. We wanted to provide a little bit of flexibility there just in case folks wanted to go down a different path and focus on their own piece that was going to be their own special sauce to that equation.
I think another example of that philosophy and your approach to how you deal with customers is the NVLink Fusion concept. I will say that I think it's one of the more debated topics for your company these days. Can you just walk us through what that looks like either from a product level or how you actually expect customers to deploy an NVLink Fusion configuration versus maybe your own native UALink silicon?
Yeah. To your point, yeah, it's another example of us trying to provide flexibility and optionality for customers. I think this is a pretty exciting one. Anytime you get to work with guys like NVIDIA and AWS on a project like this is something pretty meaningful and shows you there has been a track record of execution and trust built up between our companies over the course of the last several years. Very excited to be part of that program. Yeah, I'm not sure I want to get into the actual specifics around what they're specifically solving for or trying to accomplish. I would say that in general, there could be applications where a customer hyperscaler would want their accelerator to be able to interface with NVIDIA's backend scale-up topology.
It's not native for that accelerator to be able to communicate with an NVLink protocol that has been proprietary to date. Where we step in is we provide the bridge or that translation layer, with a pretty complex, I would say even almost fabric-level solution that will sit between the accelerator and the NVSwitch on the other side, on a 1:1 basis to be able to provide that translation. That requires a pretty hefty amount of collaboration and coordination and development with both of those companies to make that happen. Very excited about that project. It's opened some new doors as well. NVIDIA can be a good matchmaker, so we're seeing additional doors opening as a function of that.
I haven't talked about customers or any specifics there, but I would say that there's the one collaboration that we've talked about openly, but there's others percolating as well.
It sounds very, I don't know, bespoke and hand-in-hand. How should we think about the competitive environment in those kind of projects?
Yeah, I would say, yeah, it's a custom solution, so it's not something that's going to be handed out and multi-sourced or something like that. Yeah, it's going to be coming down to relationships, track record of execution, trust. There will be a whole slew of different opportunities and sockets to go after. I'm sure that we will not win every single one of them. There's other folks in the space as well that will certainly be looking to attack and grow along with this market opportunity as well. Nice to have a lead customer to hang our hat on. I'm sure there'll be a tremendous amount of learnings gathered through this process that will give us a good leg up and leverage as we look to support and service additional customers. Yeah, it'll be competitive. Yeah, it won't be a multi-source situation.
Yeah.
You'll win on your own merits for that specific socket and go execute against that.
Yeah. It would be fair to characterize it.
Correct
You would get significant amounts of that.
Correct.
If not all of it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Let's spend a few minutes just on supply chain. The investor base is, or it seems investors are searching for the next bottleneck around every corner.
Yeah.
I guess, open-ended question, where are you seeing constraints? How are you thinking about dealing with it? We saw AMD invest $10 billion in their Taiwanese supply chain relatively recently. How are you going about managing that side of the thing?
Yeah, we've been building out our backend operations for a long period of time, and it's always been kind of built with an eye towards scale, volume, and big numbers ramping, right? Even from when we were a smaller company. That was largely driven by the customers that we were trying to obtain and service and support. We've been successful at that, and it's kind of paid dividends. I would say from a supply standpoint, we have a very good understanding what our allocation profile looks like on both the front end and the back end, looking out through 2027, and feel very comfortable about where we stand from a supply standpoint. Of course, we've buffered that with kind of upside as well to the extent that customers come back and need more. Does this solve for infinite upside? No, of course it doesn't.
In terms of what we've built in terms of our model and how we're looking at things and what the customers are conveying to us, we feel very comfortable with our supply situation, with room for upside. To your point, that's also not a foolproof plan because there's other pieces of the puzzle that are within these racks. To the extent that they're short on something else, could that delay a program rollout? Could it delay the timing of something? Sure, it could. We've typically tried to provide a decent amount of buffer around our expectations for timing and ramps anyway to kind of hopefully protect and stay conservative against those types of scenarios. Nothing I would call out specifically.
I know everybody's working very hard to kind of not let that happen, but for us, in terms of what we control, we feel very comfortable at this moment.
Hard to hold you responsible for someone else's part if it becomes a bottleneck.
Yes.
On that same topic, thinking about the future roadmap, one of the places I think is the most bottlenecked, if that's a word, is the optical space. I think it's fair to say that that's a relatively new area of supply for you guys, is that work would presumably need to start getting done today. Is that fair to say or any comments there?
Yeah. Again, this has been something that's been kind of going on for the last couple of years. We've been working and partnering with across the ecosystem for both the electrical side of the house as well as the photonic side of the house. We're building out manufacturing capabilities around the fiber coupler as well.
Yeah.
That kind of came with the Xscale acquisition. We're expanding that profile kind of proactively to be able to service kind of good volume in 2027 and ramping well beyond that. Yeah, I think we feel. Again, it's a very tall task. In addition to developing these products, the guys have been mandated with building out that ecosystem and the supply chain in order to give customers confidence that we can support and supply. Yeah, in concert with the customers as well. It's a good one-two punch.
Helps when you have.
Yeah. Good one-two punch to go out into the market and kind of get what you need, so.
Yeah. I think I'm required to use the word agentic at some point during the fireside. I think it was surprising to hear maybe some discussion of Leo and CXL. We wrote a deep dive in 2024, and CXL was this whole chapter, and then nobody talked about CXLs for another two years.
Yeah.
How does agentic and agentic workloads sort of fit into the Leo portfolio?
Yeah. As you're kind of alluding to, the dynamics within the memory space have become quite challenged over the course of the last six to nine months, with rising prices and supply constraints. I would say that where we were previously very focused and engaged with customers on the more general purpose compute applications, your more standard servers, that we're now seeing a lot of increased interest, engagement, activity around leveraging CXL within AI inferencing applications. We talked a little bit about this on the conference call, that basically hyperscalers are looking very closely on different ways to optimize and get every penny they can, or get every bit of performance they can out of every penny that they spend on the memory side. That activity and engagement is all very good. That's very broad, and it could be very meaningful.
I think the one kind of more most tangible piece of that is we did talk about a new design win.
Right.
With a hyperscaler customer, for a customized version of Leo that will be used for its CXL kind of connectivity purposes within a kind of AI inferencing appliance. That will be hopefully the first shot across the bow in terms of some real revenue and some real momentum within the CXL space. I agree, it's been a long time coming. We've been talking about it since IPO, and it's unfortunately kind of lagged behind because AI kind of took the day, and CapEx started to go that direction. Yeah, kind of funny how things come back around, and we're certainly seeing a lot of interest there and excited about it finally kind of kicking off.
I think your P&L's done okay. Big picture to close. We're at time, but what's the biggest difference between the conversations that you're having with us and the conversations you're having with customers and ecosystem partners? What are we too focused on? What are we not focused on enough?
I think the biggest thing that we hear from customers that you guys probably don't have as much visibility toward is really kind of that three to five-year lens, where they know exactly what they're trying to build, where they're trying to go with their accelerator capabilities, with their rack capabilities, then how many of these things they want to ultimately cluster up and scale up. What that does is create a tremendous amount of challenge and complexity for the connectivity backbone of all of this. They need to be very tight with folks like us and some of our peers to be able to solve for some of these challenges in order to meet their deadlines and their timelines and service the workloads that they're trying to prosecute.
I would say that the conversations that we're having aren't about what's going to drive revenue in 2026 or 2027 even. It's how are we going to solve these next generation connectivity challenges, 2028, 2029, 2030, layered across a broader portfolio for Astera Labs across both optical and copper. There's a tremendous amount of work and collaboration and co-development that's being done in order to make that all happen. That's probably a bit of stuff that you guys are not seeing the full, kind of all the way down to the lowest levels of.
Great. Well, perfect place to wrap. Nick, thanks so much for your time.
Yep. Appreciate it, John. Thanks.