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Okay, very good. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Goldman Sachs New Copian Technology Conference. My name is Jim Schneider. I'm a Senior Equity Analyst here at Goldman Sachs, and it's my pleasure to welcome Credo . We are really happy to have CEO Bill Brennan and CFO Dan Fleming with us today. Welcome, guys. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having us.
You sit in a very hot part of the market right now, tied to AI infrastructure within data centers, specifically connectivity. In your words, what is the mission and vision of the company? How has the journey been so far, and what problems is Credo trying to solve more efficiently and effectively for everybody else?
Sure. I'm with the company 12 years now, and when I joined the company, we had this vision that the data center was going to be driving an exponential need for more bandwidth. It's taken many years, but it's on a super accelerated pace. The mission's been pretty consistent and is breaking bandwidth barriers by delivering highly reliable and energy-efficient connectivity solutions. That's what we've been at for the past decade for sure, and it's really in hyperdrive right now. Connectivity, like within the AI space, we all think about GPUs, but it's connecting the GPUs 10,000 or 100,000 or 1 million people are talking about at very high speed with great reliability and with great energy efficiency. That's what makes the magic happen with AI. Just to put reliability in perspective, the connection between the GPU and the first switching layer, there is no redundancy.
When you get a single failure in that connection, a link flap is what the industry refers to these failures as, brings the entire cluster down. The need for more reliability is absolutely top priority. That's been a very intense focus of our team, especially over the last 12 to 18 months, as we've succeeded with the AEC product family. It's a thousand times more reliable than some of the optical connections that we're replacing.
Yeah. One question we get all the time from investors is, what is the total addressable market for AECs? How do you kind of contextualize that in terms of the overall connectivity TAM for data centers?
I get that question a lot too. I got that question nine times today.
Okay.
What's the TAM? The TAM is big. I think that the TAM is growing, and it's larger than we conceptualized back when we thought about this market. I can talk about the different parts of the TAM, but I think at a high level, I used to think about the market in terms of, say, a $2 billion TAM. Now I think about the market in terms of, say, a $5 billion- $10 billion TAM. That's really driven by different parts within the network where AECs make a lot of sense. We started our business connecting next to TORs in general compute. Then we talked a lot about switch racks that sit in the higher level switching tiers within the front-end network. Then AI happened, and we talk about scale-out network. We talk about the scale-up network.
We see Ethernet, we're not fully penetrated by any means in these areas. On top of that, scale-up is coming. When we think in terms of volume, the front-end network, give that a 1X relative size, we view the scale-out opportunity as being a 10X size on actual connections, number of connections. We think scale-up, when it goes full rack scale to row scale, that represents another 10X in potential volume. You can follow the analysts to get their view of the top down, but I can definitely make a case it's a large and growing market. I don't think there's any kind of questions about is optical going to replace copper anytime soon. I've been fighting that whole conversation for the 12 years I've been here. I was advised, don't do anything for copper, you're making a big mistake. Now we're actually replacing optical connections.
I don't think there's any doubt over the next five to ten years that it's a large market.
How do you think about what types of connections AECs ultimately displace? Is it optical, conventional copper, what is it?
Yeah, so it's, you know, the product category, you can think about it, you know, we came into a world that everything was connected by passive copper cables, certain lengths. It got to a certain length where you couldn't make that connection anymore, and it became optical. Those are the only two options. We walked into a marketplace that really fully believed that when passive copper cables kind of ran out of gas, every time you extend, you know, the length or you double the speed, you get more loss and less of an ability to do long connections. Very much we started by replacing DAC instead of it being optical. We replaced DAC. Now, with AI and the priority for reliability, we are replacing optical now as well. Limited on length, 7 m .
If a company were to figure out how to make optical connections a thousand times more reliable, that would be a, you know, very good market space to be in because you could offer that same thing at a, say, a row length, which is probably `15 m or 20 m.
Okay. On your AEC business, can we maybe talk to the primary use cases that are being adopted today? What have been the biggest kind of drivers of adoption? What other use cases do you think AECs can address in the future?
Yeah, so there's kind of basic use cases, connecting NICs or whatever that server is, appliance or general compute, computing that to the first switching layer. Then within the switching hierarchy, NIC to TOR is a huge market. You can say it's a huge market, especially because of AI, but it was a huge market even with general compute. Switch racks basically replace chassis. This is basically a chassis full of switches. Amazon for many years has been, instead of deploying chassis, say, from the big networking companies, they're buying white box switches and stacking them vertically. Replacing the backlink connection within a chassis with in-rack cables that are 3 m or less, that's one big opportunity as well.
When we think about things in terms of scale-up and scale-out and what liquid cooling is doing from the standpoint of how long the connections are, we had one customer that had an 18-rack deployment that was lightly populated. It wasn't very dense because it was air-cooled and the actual rack design couldn't source a lot of power. They redesigned it to compress 18 racks down to six. In that case, they had all optical connections. This is a different application. This is an expansion of the TAM from less than 3 m to now row scale 7 m . Many different spaces within the data center network can take advantage of AECs.
Based on your conversations with customers, what kind of pushback are you getting, if any, on the adoption of AEC?
I'd say that once a customer really engages with us, they're pulling the product. Once the light goes on, there's a lot of inertia with the way things have been done over time. People have struggled with making DACs work for the next generation. They'll do incredibly difficult things to try to fight through the signal integrity and form factor problems. A lot of people just think the default is optical. We're still in a mode where establishing this as a de facto. When it turns on, when we engage with a customer the first time, the experience is incredibly easy. We're hitting reliability, we're hitting energy efficiency, we're hitting cost. These are all great things, kind of in that order. I don't get a lot of pushback once the light goes on.
Yeah, yeah. There are still customers where the light hasn't gone on.
Sure, yeah. That's called selling.
There we go. Are passive optical cables, or copper cables, excuse me, improving in performance at all or providing comparable ROI in any way?
Yeah, so one of the things that we've seen is, you know, this kind of battle between copper and optical. The copper supply chain is not sitting still. When we had envisioned our 800 Gb or 100 Gb per lane family of AECs, we thought 3 m was going to be the maximum length that we would achieve. That was based on the copper that was available at the time, the characteristics of the copper. It was also based on our DSP. Through improvements in the DSP and in the raw copper, we're now doing 7 m . That supply chain is not standing still. I expect that supply chain is going to continue to make progress. We talk about 200 Gb per lane, 1.60 ports. I think that ship has sailed. The ecosystem will look the same. It'd be a tremendous TAM for copper and optical.
Even talking with some of the copper companies, they believe 400 Gb per lane is possible. I think that the future is definitely bright. That marketplace or that group of suppliers, they're doing amazing things that are improving. Hopefully that gives you the color.
Maybe switching to the business trends a little bit. I think you ramped up your AEC revenue pretty rapidly. I believe you're set to grow with two additional hyperscale customers in the back half of 2026. Helps to understand the visibility you have into the business, the nature of the relationships in terms of forecasts, taker pay agreements, prepaid commitments, and so on.
Yeah, so we, you know, coming out of COVID, one of the best things was that the groups that we work with in the supply chain at our customers, they want us to have 12-month forecasts. They want us to know what they're planning, and so we've got a good relationship with all of our customers. Now, within that 12 months, we don't have any taker-pay or we don't have that kind of relationship. I don't want to overship. I want to basically match our shipments to consumption. That's just a philosophical way of doing business. I don't want to talk about a huge amount of inventory that's in place that I shoved in because I had a contract and I was able to do that.
There's some fluidity within that 12-month forecast at a given customer, and especially when there's new deployments, those 12-month forecasts can be not hugely accurate. We've been on the right end of fluctuation with two of our customers recently. We had an enormous ramp, an enormous pull-in, a surprising amount of product that we were asked to ship in a very short period of time. When they got their deployment plan together and they hit basically full green light, it was like a real, strong pull into the 12-month forecast. Our fourth customer that we talked about, they're actually pulling in. On our call recently, Dan articulated that although we didn't have what we would consider material revenue, we didn't have 10% level revenue with this customer. We expect them to be a 10% customer for the year, going from basically not shipping to 10% within one year.
If you think about our growth as a company, that's an amazing amount of product that they're looking for within a short period of time. That's actually starting in the second quarter. The fifth customer we've been engaged with for a long time, and it's a function of basically sorting out their deployment plans. I don't have a solid schedule yet, but I expect it to start towards the end of the year.
Great. Maybe help us think about how you conceptualize the opportunity for pricing uplift generation to generation on your AECs products.
You want me to talk about increasing pricing in a public forum?
Yes.
I'm kidding. Naturally, we have to say go from a 400 Gb solution to an 800 Gb solution to a 1.60 ports, you know, fundamentally it's going to cost more to build. First generation, when we're shipping 25 Gb per lane, a lot of people were willing to do the work to use DACs. There's a pretty big gap in pricing between passive copper cables and what we do. I mean, it's fundamentally more expensive technology. We were kind of tethered on pricing to this very basic, you know, jumper cable, basically, passive copper cable. There was only so high we could justify if they felt like they could get the job done. Now that we're really at a point where not a lot of people are struggling with DACs, now we're being compared to optical.
We've kind of been untethered and almost lifted by optics pricing on, like, if we can save money compared to optics, I think that puts us in a good spot. If we can be a thousand times more reliable, then we can start talking about the value of the product. I think Dan has talked about margins over the last couple of years, and I think we signaled that we'd see a national expansion as speeds would increase. That's happened quite nicely.
Another question that I get a lot in terms of competition in this space is, as more people enter the space, because obviously this kind of market is going to attract more competition, how do you balance competition for market share relative to gross margins? Maybe just kind of give us the context about, you know, the value you provide that helps keep commoditization in check.
Yeah, so we're unique from the competitive landscape. We're the only true vertically integrated player in this market. We compete with groups of companies, chip companies, and cable assembly companies, and they kind of team up and they go to market that way. I'm fully crystallized on our model delivering what I would think is a competitive mode. The way we try to compete is we try to, first of all, engage with customers at a level where we enable innovation. They want special things, we do it. We are highly focused on being first to deliver samples. We're highly focused on first to being qualified and first to ramping. If we can do a good job of that, I think the competitive dynamics will play in our favor long term. That's the competitive advantage we bring.
In production, if we can be flawless with delivering, and if there is an issue, if we can absolutely be that single throat to choke, that's going to pay off. Building relationships really takes many, many cycles, many years to do, and I feel like we're well on our way. Competitively, I'm more focused on making sure we satisfy the customers.
Yeah. One of your innovations, you mentioned it before, a bit of a surprise to me initially in the market has been your 7 m AEC cable. Apart from your first customer, tell us about the interest in that specific product, and then maybe conceptually how much longer you think you can make a connection electrical without losing performance or signal integrity.
I think 7 m is going to be the max.
Okay.
I'm not going to, maybe that's a challenge to the copper ecosystem to do better. 7 m at 100 Gb per lane, when we talk about going to 200 Gb per lane, it probably goes from seven to five. Tell me the first part of your question again.
What's the customer interest been in 7 m ?
Yeah, so what drove that interest was, you know, our customer was on this mission to build a zero flap cluster. If they looked at their link flaps, these momentary, intermittent disconnections in the link, it basically shuts the entire cluster down. They're on this mission to come up with a zero flap cluster, and they asked us to build 7 m cables because the reliability, we just don't have flaps with AECs. We don't have these intermittent failures that you get from laser-based optics. That was what drove the ask. What drove the possibility was liquid cooling and power sourcing. It's the example where I said 18 racks got compressed to six. This trend is going to continue in the market. This is the first of what I expect many customers to pursue.
It's such a fundamentally better product from the standpoint of reliability that I think the interest is going to be large long term. That applies to scale out and it applies to scale up as well.
I think the market has a view that your AEC revenue is somewhat levered to, you know, a couple or one custom AEC program or custom AEC programs in general. In other words, as your shipments, their shipments go, yours will follow or maybe yours lead and theirs follow either way. Especially your largest customer. Do you think that's a true statement?
No.
Talk about how.
I'll tell you why.
Yeah. Talk about how you may participate in, say, merchant accelerator clusters as well.
Yeah, we're not a proxy for custom cloud silicon, just to be clear. Our third and fourth customer that we talk about, we're only connecting with NVIDIA gear. That, you know, very clearly yesterday at the AI Infra Show, Meta made a presentation. There's a nice photo of a rack with, it was cabled out with purple cables, which are our cables. That's all NVIDIA gear. We're definitely not a proxy. We look at any GPU, any XPU as an opportunity. We should be able to engage across the board.
Right. You referenced or I referenced before the two additional hyperscale customers. Maybe talk about how you expect them to ramp relative to your lead customer.
I think, from the standpoint of the timing of the ramp or kind of the size of revenue that they can, we can measure it in different ways. I do think that at a high level, you could tie the overall opportunity to CapEx. If one guy is double the CapEx of another guy, it's hard to make the case unless we get fully penetrated. If you say full penetration at both, I think the larger CapEx could be driving a larger revenue number for us. As I think about any one of these hyperscalers, my feeling is that they could drive a significant revenue, well over $100 million per year revenue with us. Even as we're approaching $1 billion run rate, kind of solidly, be a 10% customer, even as we keep growing in the future.
I think all of these relationships have the ability to ramp quickly and drive big numbers.
Maybe away from AECs for a moment, you've talked about the value proposition of Linear Receive Optics or LRO from a power perspective. Maybe help us understand how adoption has been, the level of interest you've seen, and how big this LRO offering can be in the context of your overall Optical DSP business.
Sure. Kind of shifting gears to optical DSPs, there's a really strong push in the market for better energy efficiency. If you break down an optical module and you say, how does the power look ratioed, the DSP is by far the highest power component, even half to even greater than half the total power consumption. If you make the case that for 1.6T, that you hit a wall on power and that you need to do things differently, this is where the concept about LPO came from. It was a couple of years ago at the OFC conference. We took away with LPO, what you lose is, you abandon interoperability. Signal integrity is not as good. Traditional test points for debug and so forth, you lose all of this.
What you sacrifice to get lower power is questionable if it's even something you can really deploy in a world where you need interoperability. If you own the end-to-end connection, it might be possible if you put the work in. What we came up with in response to that call to action for power was how do we keep everything you get with a full DSP, but get the power advantage of maybe reducing the amount of DSP that you're doing. Linear Receive Optics is basically doing, instead of DSP on both ends of the fiber, you just do it on one end of the fiber. We've proven it to be successful. You're talking about a marketplace that is, the way things are done are with full DSPs. We can think theoretically about moving, but there's a risk aversion to it.
We're doing both full DSP and LRO DSP solutions, and it's really allowing the customer to decide. If they can fit under the power ceiling and use a full DSP, they typically will. We are having a lot of interest and how that plays out in the next two to three year timeframe, we'll see. I'm agnostic, but what we're trying to do is solve problems for our customers.
Maybe just talk about the competitive landscape you see in that market, especially given Marvell's dominance in DSP and the fact that Broadcom obviously has a lot of scale to go after the opportunity if it becomes big.
Sure. Yeah, a lot of respect for what Marvell has done, a lot of respect for them, you know, maintaining their incumbency, a lot of respect to Broadcom as well. When I think competitively about, you know, this space, we're really thinking along the lines of how do we move the market to more features. Instead of saying we're going to just stay in the cage and fight, you know, fight hand-to-hand combat on optical DSPs, we're thinking about how to go to higher level ground, give the market something additional to what, you know, the market has today. The hint that I'll drop is it's all related to reliability. How do you improve, through an optical DSP design, how do you improve reliability for a laser-based optic system by a thousand times? Right? That's very much a system-level product.
We'll talk more about that in the upcoming months, but our mindset is, yeah, I can compete head-to-head, but if I can take the competition to a higher ground, I think we're going to fare even better.
Yeah, fair enough. Don't leave you out. The conversation is not about financials. You know, your gross margins, you've been trending, you know, above your long-term guidance of 63% to 65% despite lower IP revenue contribution. What's driving the strength of gross margins right now?
Yeah, what we've laid out going back almost four years now as we went public is that we would experience an expanding margin due to increasing scale. We were maybe, you'd say, sub-scale four years ago. That has played itself out quite, quite well. In fact, even over just the last year, you see that pretty, pretty emphatically. You know, we went, if you look, Q1 of fiscal 2026 versus our Q1 of fiscal 2025, 274% year-over-year growth. The product gross margin expanded over 500 basis points. Now we're at the point now, as you clearly point out, we are above our long-term expectation for gross margin. The scale story or the increasing scale story has played out as we expected it to. In fact, you might say we're kind of, you know, mission achieved there.
If you look at sequentially from Q4 to Q1, 31% top line growth and essentially flat product gross margin. It was up 12 basis points. From here on out, what you might expect to see is more product mix variation. There will be some variability quarter- over- quarter in gross margin. We've emphasized that we do not expect to change our long-term expectation. 63% to 65% is our long-term expectation, even though there might be pockets of time like we're in right now where we might be at or above that long-term expectation.
Fair enough. Maybe talk about some of the key areas of R&D you're most focused on and whether you expect R&D intensity to go up at all.
I'll speak to the dollars of it and then Bill can maybe speak to some of the activities. What we've laid out for this fiscal year, for fiscal 2026, is that OpEx is increasing about 50% year- over- year. We continue to add top flight engineers as fast as we can find them, and that trend will continue. The other thing I've mentioned is that over half of our R&D spend is really focusing on future programs, optical in particular. Those are the areas that we're focusing on. That bears fruit three to five years from now. It's not a today thing.
Now, just sort of philosophically, you know, you've, let me just ask you broadly. You know, long term, do you think Credo is going to remain a pure-play connectivity company? Do you have ambitions to diversify into other products in the future?
Yeah, I envision us staying close to home. I mean, I think if you were to talk about adjacencies that we could make the case for adjacencies, you might say switching, you might say GPUs. At this point, we feel like we can grow for a long time. When we think about going from, say, $1 billion run rate to a $5 billion and beyond, I think there's plenty of opportunities that we're going to pursue within the connectivity space. We are looking at furthering our system-level products. When I think about that, I think in three tiers, and I've talked about this recently, but certainly stress is core to everything we do. We think certainly really matters. We can talk about examples if we have time, which probably we don't. What we do is different and meaningful. The chips are going to be better.
The system level, like what we've shown with AECs, that system-level product has been really the key to our success as a company. When we think about optical investments in the future, I don't think in terms of the Optical DSP. I think about building Optical DSPs that enable better system-level products. I think you can see us going down a system-level path in multiple areas in optical. I think you can think about us going down the system-level path, even for connectivity markets like GPU to memory. I think that's going to be the key to us moving the company from where we are to doing $5 billion and beyond in the future. That's really what we're focused on. You might see us pursue inorganic growth in terms of the right resources, the right IP.
There may even be companies that have revenue that could be a Credo. Generally speaking, we're heads up on really where we're going to take the company over the next five to ten years. We're not thinking, at this point, we're not thinking switching and we're not thinking GPUs.
Very good. Maybe lastly, you've met with a lot of investors today and presumably over the last several weeks since you reported. Maybe give us a sense about what is the one piece of the Credo story you think is underappreciated or missed or misunderstood by investors right now?
Although it's frustrating, I understand that, you know, when people think about the cable, they think of commodity. They think, obviously that's going to be commoditized long term. I don't think there's an appreciation for the difficulty at a technology level to build these system-level solutions. Really, the differentiation we're bringing, the advantages that we're bringing to our customers. I would say that over time there's a stronger understanding. Dan's a great CFO. He should win awards for the things that he's done, transforming our company. You get to do that when you're doing super valuable things with your customers. Even when I told my mom that we were going to build cables, she said, "I'm very nervous. I'm worried about it. I have no idea what a semiconductor is, but I know what a cable is." Getting over that perception is what I would love to do.
Excellent. I think the stock price speaks volumes about what people think. Thank you very much for being here. We appreciate you coming.
Thanks. I really appreciate it.