Thank you for joining. Tim Long here, Barclays IT hardware, comm equipment analyst. Happy to have Super Micro, Michael with us today. Appreciate the time. I know it's a pretty busy one. You got to do safe harbor. You're good.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. Please refer to our Safe Harbor statements on our website for regarding forward-looking statements.
Did it from memory?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the short, shortened version.
Okay. Great. All right. We've got some stuff to go through here. Maybe we'll, you know, just hit on kind of the hot investor questions that we're getting. Maybe let's just recap. Obviously, last quarter you had some push-outs, and maybe just walk us through, kind of, you know, what caused it and, you know, how you read into that as we look forward into, you know, future deployments.
Yeah. 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 dynamism happening, and we had some configuration changes that, you know, delayed some shipments. Obviously, we're through that. I wouldn't say obviously we were through that. We talked about the December quarter at the time and $13 billion in orders for GB300, which was a pretty massive number. And we moved the needle on the guidance to from 33 to 36. So visibility, demand all looked 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, you know, just talk a little bit about these configuration changes. They've happened before, not just to Supermicro, to others in the industry. It just seems, you know, there's a lot more complexity. So.
Yeah.
You know, at the end of the day, does this, do these type of dynamics, obviously, it's a push-out, not great in the near term, but, is this dynamic of things getting more complicated a positive for Super Micro? How do you, how do you view it?
So we view it, you know. There's some folks that talk 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's gonna run a GB300. Not every customer's gonna run a Vera Rubin in the future. There's multiple verticals and stacks that NVIDIA is trying to support. There's 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 en masse when 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. It all goes down to the point of, like, you know, complexity. So, you know, future racks are gonna look different than the traditional rack, right? There might be power sidecars, etc. There's lots of things. Liquid cooling is a pretty big component. And so we're supplying all the componentry that surrounds that, and the margin profile there is improved. So as we move forward, we'll be a full-stack supplier for AI and other, you know, enabling application solutions.
So it will make Super Micro look a lot different, as we go out of several quarters, if not one or two years. And if you believe the $1 trillion market that some folks talk about, or three or four, and we're just 10% of the market where we kind of are today, that'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 we're all in on building that for our customer base.
Okay. Great. Maybe you mentioned the really positive orders and the revenue outlook. Just how do you think, how do we think about visibility? Obviously, this is a business where there's big chunky deals, and, you know, 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 in a?
That's, you know, it'd be great from a standpoint of visibility. I think we have very good visibility, and we think that'll ultimately come to play. So that would give us the confidence to go from 33 to 36 for fiscal 2026, which is a June year-end for us. I think our guidance practice here will, you know, reflect that as we move forward. So I think we can just articulate that more precisely as we move forward.
Okay. You mentioned the, you know, industry worries about standardization and gross margins, and you mentioned some of the things. Could you just elaborate a little bit on what you think develops over the next few years that enables Supermicro to maybe, you know, improve that gross margin percentage on the big AI-type deals?
So in the short term, we have a couple 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 in scale, giving me as much as you can, as soon as you can. So customer mix there, and some of these customers are large and have some buying power. So 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 2026, we would anticipate adding two to four more scale customers on top of the four that we already have. We would grow the four, and then we would add more scale customers. In Q1, we added a new scale customer and grew significantly with one of our larger customers.
So we're tracking from that perspective. But as more and more customers come into the fold, there's an expansion in the NeoCloud space. There's an expansion with respect to sovereign opportunities. As the customer base expands out, we believe that one, they'll, we'll 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, you know, a better, you know, we'll iron out some of the inefficiencies. And if you think about this quarter, December, at least 10 and a half, it's a brand new product en masse coming through to the factory. So there was a higher cost, and you, as you well know, following hardware, any new launch has overhead.
And so this has just happened to be a lot of overhead because of the size and the quantum of this, 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 would support, again, we go back to the 10% of the 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. Yeah. It does seem some of your larger 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?
From your perspective.
Yeah. Well, I would imagine that the dynamics have been so intense that we've been guiding margins for a quarter at a time, right? Like, again, we've basically 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 things change, you know, 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, you know, double-digit gross margins as we move forward. And that will come as a factor of, again, customer mix, product mix, and manufacturing efficiency. So all those things we're working hard on to move the needle on that as we build a bigger, better company.
Okay. Sounds good. You mentioned in there D-DCBBS, data center building block solutions. I just gotta make sure I get a lot of letters.
Yeah. There'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 gonna mean to the, to the company?
So as 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've always done is more performance in a rack, better power delivery, you know, so to speak, or power savings, more performance, etc. 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, you know, 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 customers as we move forward. You know, there's battery backup, there's power shelves.
As you look at some of the newer rack and developments, you know, a power sidecar, you know, liquid-to-air and cooling elements. So we're putting all those together depending on what the customer needs is. So building a business off of enabling data centers, 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, you know, sense of customer feedback and, you know, what your bigger customers that might be looking at this are liking about it?
We've scoped out a few from that perspective. We're already delivering to some of our customers some of those cooling elements to help them lower their or increase their PUE, right? There's some early signs of that moving forward. I think the next you know milestone markers will be when we'll 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 of a requirement for our full stack, and we'll grow with them, and that should be reflected in results and future quarters.
Okay. Great. Maybe we could touch on capacity a little bit. It's an industry-wide, you know, topic for everyone in the value chain. So I know you guys are, you're building and increasing your rack output. So maybe walk us through, you know, the timeline there and what that's gonna do for revenue opportunities.
We have multiple locations. We're in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Netherlands, and we're looking for more sites in the Americas. We've been expanding capacity. Currently, we're planning to exit fiscal 2026 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 cooled racks ASP commands, it's a pretty big price tag. Let's 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. And 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.
Our capacity plans are in line with what we think is the opportunity and easily should be able to support the figures we talked about earlier.
Okay. And you mentioned the one trillion or three trillion or four trillion. So this is not the end, I'm assuming, if that.
It's not the end, but at the same time, if you, you know, like the dynamic, if the opportunity set continues to expand and, again, it's tied to the application and, you know, we're all in San Francisco right now and you see the Waymo's buzzing around in this city. But if that becomes a nationwide thing, there'll be multiple vendors supplying, you know, autonomous driving vehicles, whether it's the transportation sector for trucking, etc. 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, you know, I'm 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, right, than that number, but if it continues in that path, we'll certainly need more capacity to serve it, and then there'll be capacity requirements for the DCBBS element, right? That's where this non, you know, rack that it's, you know, it's not liquid cooled. So we'll focus on both of those things and the unit volumes, etc. 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 two to four, you know, scale customers and adding another one last quarter. How diverse, and it sounds like you're gonna add some more. How, how diversified do you see the business becoming if we look out a few years?
This is an interesting question. You've been covering the space for quite some time. And if you think about 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 are delivering to their end customers that are running on different various forms of equipment that need, you know, certain amount of support. They're starting to take workloads and put it into the NeoClouds. And, you know, that's an amazing kind of element right 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'll be enterprises that, you know, are data-centric that'll want to support that as well. So, you know, think of the, you know, the famous, application companies that could turn whatever their enterprise applications into an AI, service. So we'll be able to support all of those things. So the customer base is, from our perspective, anyone that cares about, application optimization. So we're not so focused on, is it an enterprise customer? Is it a new 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 NeoClouds, we have enterprises, and sovereigns is, you know, 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, you know, I think most folks know that we have something to do with the Elon complex, right? So, very forward-thinking application development there. Operators understand that we're supplying and supporting these customers, and they're coming to us.
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 a CapEx, either a technology perspective or even a capacity perspective. We expect the customer base to broaden out over time. Again, it would have to if we're gonna support, you know, a trillion-plus market opportunity and, you know, in a fairly short order of time.
Okay. Yeah. I get, you know, the focus on the big applications, but there's just so much focus on when the sovereigns are gonna 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.
Yeah.
Stack is better for a Supermicro, so maybe just touch on where you are with those verticals.
So my understanding of, 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, you know, pre-Thanksgiving when there was quite a bit of a confab and 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 2026. We're close to it right now. And the proof points will become obvious. And whether they deploy on, you know, immediately or through a partner, you know, 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 talk a little bit about the complexion of that? Like, you know, how many big customers? Is it new? Some of it, you know, new footprints, some of it's expansions?
On average, I would say it's there was a couple of customers in that cohort. One was fairly large. So, and I think, you know, there was some new, and there was some old. So it was a mix.
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 Supermicro playing there as we get more inferencing in edge.
So we've been focused on solutioning for those type of opportunities with some of our key partners. And so it's still early and still on the come, but you know, if you would consider the RTX, you know, solution from NVIDIA, there's other elements and other ways to get to those markets. So we have lots of activity 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 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, you know, diversification from just the NVIDIA GPU, you know, engines?
I think from that perspective, we have deployments with AMD at scale with some of the large customers that are NVIDIA customers. I think that they're taking those workloads that are capable of running at scale and supporting the customer. So AMD is supporting the customer and the customer's workloads. So I think there's ample opportunity for us. We're excited about the roadmap that they have as well. 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. Like I said, there are customers that 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's expanding, and ultimately, potentially, that gets into the ASIC market, and there's multiple players there.
Does that, you know, present a different set of engineering challenges or how?
Yeah. I would imagine there's a lot of ability to leverage on the engineering side, but yeah, they'll all be different. We have, you know, half of the workforce is engineering, and that's a key strength. It's becoming more and more important. We have teams, you know, working on different platforms across the stack, so that's a really big focus, and I think investors should understand that if you believe that this broadens out and there's different use cases and different verticals, or if there's a different model for specific, you know, industry verticals, we'll support that.
Then if you get a better cost per token because you're using Supermicro's engineered solution, you know, 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 meet the evolution of technology to meet what they're trying to deliver to their customer. You know, Tesla's a great example of that.
Okay. I did 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 three 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, you know, what positions you better there?
What positions us really, really well is that what our focus is to make that customer happy, right? At each step of the way, I mean, we started out as a motherboard company.
Right.
Every, 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, you know, well, this was gonna 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, 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, you know, trying to figure out what to do. At the same time, you know, you have to focus on an optimal cost solution.
As 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, you know, millions and 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 the power by 2%, you know, 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 saves them bottom-line costs.
So, you know, better reliable equipment is a value proposition. So all the combination of these things as we move forward are gonna be magnified. They're gonna be magnified by multitudes of platforms. And if you look at it, you know, who will be the leading supplier in 2027 for AI application, AI optimized applications? And 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, you know, we continue to focus on the customer, and that's where, you know, 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.
Yeah.
Curious about as you, you know, branch out into other technologies and get the building blocks together, seems like there's a lot more engineering or investment intensity. So how do we manage, like, kind of R&D and OpEx profile in the wake of, you know, probably a more limited gross margin?
Yeah.
Dynamic over time?
I think we've always been a fairly lean and frugal organization while scaling up, and so that cadence and that, you know, focus, hasn't changed. You know, 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, you know, our, you know, boundaries, 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.
You know, it's a long-term view, but the company's all in on doing that and at scale, at a fast pace, with the intensity of competition. We seem to be winning more and more, as witness, you know, $13 billion in orders for just this one platform in December alone.
Okay. Yeah, maybe just one other, back to kind of the customer side. You know, you talked about, just curious of your sense on how sticky the Supermicro platform is when you're in at a scale customer.
Yeah.
You know, there was a period where it was like someone wins a big deal and someone else wins a big deal. Everyone's obviously gonna be dual sourcing or triple sourcing because it's getting so big. But talk a little bit about that stickiness and, you know, what, what is it that the cut that will keep you in a, 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, you know, we've had some scale customers that were not so scale 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 some puts and takes, but 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 know, you would be asking me a different question, right?
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. That's kind of really led us to, you know, what's the next enablement, right? The next enablement was like the data center building blocks enablement as opposed to just providing them with one component. That encompasses a lot of different platform opportunities for those customers. Keeping them happy keeps them in the seat, and we've done a really good job by witness of, you know, 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 so much.
Thanks so much.