These controls are. Welcome everyone. Day one of Citi's Technology Conference. My name is Asiya Merchant. Afternoon here of day one. Glad to see everybody. 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 is here on the stage 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 am going to allow for a few minutes for investors to ask questions as well. Please do raise your hand so we can bring the mic to you. All right, Mike. Pretty good. How is Super Micro doing?
Super Micro's doing great.
All right. Well, you guys had a very, very strong fiscal 2026 growth rate, right? I think you talked about 78% that you reported. You have Q1 revenue that is very, very strong coming in. Talk to me about just your guidance, how you are thinking about other constraints that are factoring into your guidance here.
Yeah.
Just how you are thinking about the picture that you are sharing for Q1 relative to some of the other constraints that are out there.
Well, interesting. It is good to see you again. I think it was a couple of years ago, we were on stage, and we had just done a $14.9 billion a year.
Yep.
Now we are talking about doing at the midpoint a $15 billion quarter.
Right.
How things have changed or progressed over time. Anyway. Obviously demand has been strong in the backdrop and we have reflected that in our guidance. We talk about customer diversification and expansion of opportunity. There is an expansion of product platforms across the board. From our perspective, we are trying to fulfill that demand. 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 is pretty helpful from a standpoint of backstopping the order book and the guidance that we have on a go forward basis.
Yeah, there is a lot of discussion around constraints, right? Everybody is reading the papers, everybody knows there is constraints, whether it is memory, it is CPU, it is power. Why do you feel like this demand is durable and it is not just they are coming to Super Micro, they are coming maybe to your peers and saying, "Give us this," and there is a little bit of double ordering perhaps because everybody is worried that they are not going to get it?
Yeah, I think the durability, one, the guidance across the board, or sorry, the outlook across the board for the industry has been robust. There's been outsized performance from a lot of players. The backdrop of this has been the applications.
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. 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. Those are enterprise-focused elements where I think the market maybe a year ago was like, "Is the enterprise going to adopt AI?" There's clear proof points that there's an expansion going across the board. When you look at, again, our diversification across the customer base is really supportive of this. The solution element is where we're really focused on.
We mentioned that to you in the past, months or quarters ago, that DCBBS strategy will help the solutioning to the customer, and we're focused on delivering an application-optimized AI solution or a factory, so to speak, and there'll be a mixture of components that are in there, and we're going to mix those up, and those are supportive of margins, and the application stack is expanding. We're pretty excited, and we're racing ahead to build what customers need.
Okay. I think customer diversification has always been one that has always been on focus for Super Micro, right? 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. Now you have more than that. I think you have more than nine customers that are generating $1 billion in revenue. The diversification story has played out well for you. Any one quarter, there could be maybe more customer concentration. How are you thinking about customer concentration today? Is this a path that is still 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 for you guys?
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 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 AI CPU systems are going to be offered by some of the larger customers. An enhancement of what they're doing at the large customer site.
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 in AI. We are there to support them, and we have basically almost any diversification and breadth of platform for them. This will be very helpful from a standpoint of broadening out that customer base. We are already seeing it, so that is great. But we will always have, and we always have had some larger customers in the mix, and the argument has been, we are reliant on one large customer or two large customers, and they will be displaced by someone else. We have had a very nice history of gradually expanding with our customers and expanding with our capabilities for them and serving them.
Customer focus is a huge thing for us, and we are offering them a whole host of different solutions to accommodate their needs.
Okay
Cost-effectively well.
And then just a little bit on lumpiness, right? 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. 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, on your working capital side as well.
Yeah. So from a lumpiness perspective, if you want to call it that, there's been some challenges at the customer sites, or supplier sites or whatever it may be. We've always captured those revenues downstream. It just might not be in the same timeframe as what we had anticipated due to things beyond our control.
But 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, the other thing is the industry's 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 it for quite some time. So we're kind of meeting that in a better fashion, where we anticipate or the customer's 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 the systems working.
So if they have made a significant investment, let's say half a billion dollars or a billion dollars, and they're sitting there with idle systems because they can't integrate it, they can't get the networking stack to work, they can't get it integrated with their storage stack, the power cooling's not in the right area, but we're productizing those things so that we can drop in factories, essentially AI factories for the customers, so that when they make the investment, it hits the floor, they turn it on, it's pre-validated, so 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.
Now, the hyperscalers can do that because they have all the engineering support in the world, but enterprises and many Neoclouds do not have those capabilities. 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 there's some figures out there, like eight racks of NVL72, being down for 30 days or not being available for 30 days is $3 million. So you could see customers that have 100 or some customers might have 1,000 or more, that's a huge amount of dollars for a one-month idle kind of situation.
Customers are now realizing that, where they might not have realized it before in a race to low price was the element. Now the race to have a system that works and services are available is more of a thrust. So delivering the value is what we've been doing, and we've articulated that even a year ago with the DCBBS strategy where people were 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, gets their systems up, we're working faster, and it's better for our partners because everything's more synchronous.
Right.
That 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. Then just within that mix, you have enterprise, you have sovereigns, you have Neoclouds. Any further incremental breakdown you could say, 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.
Okay
Because the irony here is we're not even talking about hyperscalers, but hyperscalers are putting workloads into our customer base.
Right.
That customer base is expanding, and you're seeing some newer contracts that have come up. You're like, "Holy cow," I think a year ago, "Where's the revenue going to come from?" And we're seeing it. So you have improved credit quality across the board and enterprises participating in. 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 of very large enterprise partners, Cisco or VMware. That cadence of adoption is we're early stages, but it's spreading out, and it's proof points for our order book and probably others in the industry.
Mm-hmm. Okay. 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 speed 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? Are you seeing adoption at an equal pace between the Neoclouds, the Sovereigns, the enterprises, or is one of them further along?
Yeah, 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 with an increased enhanced reliability is paramount. All the different parts, we need to integrate them to actually make them work, firmware, 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. 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 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, how should we think about the overall margins of the business? Where do you think the target could be as we're-
Yeah
-growing your revenues? Yeah.
We tend to, on the gross margins side, we're given one quarter at a time.
Right
Because of the variability in what we're actually doing. 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. There were 14, 17. We just showed that we could do a 17 and change quarter.
There were some favorable things in that mix. As we move forward, the target is to solution the customer and provide more value to them so that we can capture a better margin number. The long-term goal is clearly higher. We called that out a while back, where profitability was important, and we've been working on the profitability element. I think as we encapsulate more value and more componentry into the systems, I think the market looks at AI systems as a low-margin build and they pin a lot of our success to that.
Yeah.
What we're doing for those customers, there's multiple different variations, and customers are kind of aligning them to the application. There's often times where we might be the only vendor supplying that, and if we put some more componentry, whether it's power or 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 them a significant amount of dollars on the back end of having the system available and having a more reliable system. We're moving more into that model. We've called that out prior and now we're actually delivering that. We're on a pretty good path here.
What about on the, as you are 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 whoever the end customer is can turn it on, it works. What about on the OpEx side of things? As these are scaling and you are growing them as a mix of your business, do you also have to invest as much in OpEx on the service side?
Currently, we are investing in go-to-market and services.
Okay.
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 is enhancement to the business model. The L12 element of validated services is super important and so we want to support that as well. It is built into the guide and the model and we have been very efficient from an operating expense perspective. So we are not going to break any eggs in this situation. Could we spend a little bit more if we need to? You probably wouldn't see that in the mix, but we are investing in that. We have been investing in capacity. We have been investing in a lot of different areas and building the business as quickly as possible. So it is a real-time, runtime environment.
Okay.
Large public startup.
And similarly, I know you just talked about the go-to-market, but the enterprise business and the channel, it is pretty diverse, especially as you think about international as well. You have to support these customers. Just help us understand, given the model that you guys have typically run where OpEx is still a very small percentage of your revenues, how are you thinking about penetrating this enterprise base and what additional investments that you talked about are you doing that is going to support the go-to-market and the sales and operational side of?
Well, I think it is important to understand that the basis of the organization is enterprise-focused and always has been. What we are 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 have been covering the COTS, Super Micro servers networking, buy the off-the-shelf server. From that perspective, we are focused on delivering these solutions. Again, we have multiple different partners, multiple different platforms within those partners, that customers are now understanding that they need. So we are front-faced with the enterprise. It just happens to be that the enterprise that segment of the market that we are engaged with are ones that are very technology foot forward, and the proof points 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 is arguable that Neoclouds are enterprise businesses. We have some really strong relationships on the OEM front, where our systems are literally installed everywhere. 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 want to support those customers on the services side. If there is markets that we are not necessarily present, we will partner, and we are 100% committed to it, and that has been the engine of growth over the past, let us just say, 10 years for the organization. So putting more performance, more power in a smaller envelope, all the things that a customer needs.
We have argued that enterprises are on aging equipment, and if they want to put AI Factories in, there is a likelihood of a significant refresh of the existing CPU-type business, consolidate their board density, more power, and then have some room for 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 are 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 that offering expands just from high-end GPU deployments, maybe to CPU deployments, how should we think about liquid cooling and how Super Micro differentiated in that space and what it could do to your overall product margins as well?
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. 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. I think that we're going to continue to push forward.
There's a lot of different ways to do liquid cooling, including immersion, and we've done that in the past, and there's call for that in some particular cases in the future. The power envelope and doing our power supplies and power 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 customer. 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 there?
I don't think we do necessarily outside of uptake of the systems that are naturally known to be liquid cooled.
Okay.
Those shipments are-
Okay
yeah.
For the large labs. Okay.
Yeah. There's customers that are retrofitting their cooled systems with some cooling element to get more performance out of them, to cool them, to get more power efficient.
Okay.
We are able to supply that in many cases.
Inventory. I know there is a lot of changes that are constantly happening on the architecture side and CPU, GPU transitions, so your inventory did bump up quite a bit. I think you talked about inventory days roughly around 119. How are you managing this risk? Given that customers are changing, architectures are changing, customers are adopting, deciding what works, what does not work for them. And then relative to the inventory that you have, how are you managing that risk of making sure that there is not any obsolescence risk there?
Yeah. There has always been a fear of obsolescence risk, but I think it is overstated. We have been able to manage that quite effectively. We have had a few minor inventory charges in the past, and then a reversal recently. Customers are looking to use whatever they can get their hands on, so there has been an element of every tier within the market is finding homes for systems, and the durability of the systems is pretty extensive.
The $12.9 billion in inventory, I think you can match that up to the forward need of the company, of the guide. We've been pretty good at managing that quite effectively, with some minimized risk. 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.
Yeah.
Especially given you guys are talking about pretty significant demand growth here. You've raised money for that. Just walk us through, 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?
With the backdrop and 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 were striking with customers, you can imagine that the enterprise-grade customers have a. There's less pressure from. There was a lot of startup activity a year or two ago that had a little bit more lean towards terms that may not have been favorable for us. Then we put a few things through the system. There was a couple large orders that came through the system. The focus now is the diversification. We'll 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. The goal is to be self-funded downstream.
But we've been dealing with this excess of growth, and so we have had to turn to capital markets in the past, but the focus is on 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.
So-
It's a pretty big goal for the year.
Okay. The growth outlook that you've shared, about $65 billion- $70 billion, at that level, you feel internally well-funded?
Yeah, 65-72.
Right, 72.
Yeah, so. We feel pretty comfortable with what we see at this point in time.
Okay.
Clearly called that out.
Okay. All right. You have 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 are 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 would not be any of this stuff going to China, where it should not be going? Maybe if you can help investors understand what you guys have done.
Well, one, we were pretty committed to not having that happen.
Yeah.
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 was not really a big need a while back, as we have become more global, it has become a significant need. So we have had some significant adds in that area. We have programs in place and have a chief compliance officer that we have appointed and legal staff that we have added and enhanced. So from that perspective, we feel pretty good that we will have no problems as we move forward, future.
Okay. Have you seen any change from the chip suppliers or other component providers as a result of all these investigations? I know now they've come to an end.
Well, 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.
Okay.
It's been somewhat of an industry problem that everyone's trying to make sure that that's not occurring.
Okay. I'm going to ask a little bit about just the TAM. The TAM growth is pretty significant. As we're sitting here, we're on Citi's side. We did raise our own AI CapEx numbers just last week. We've heard AMD sound. 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- $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 are able to capture, in that timeframe, 10% of the market, that's a $200 billion revenue number for us.
I would argue that the solution element that we're bringing to the table the differentiation 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. As we move forward, it should be better. We're 100% attuned to that. I think that it's good news for us-
Right
-for the most part.
Okay. What about funding that kind of growth, right? I mean, as you grow from
Well, we'll worry about that when we cross that bridge. But I think one of the points about how can we get to greater than 10%, so if 10% of the customers are performance oriented and 10% of the customers are value oriented, that's 20% of the market. We kind of have a pretty good, 10% of the customers really chew through our systems pretty fast and need to replace them with the next and greatest.
There's a value-oriented customer that's looking for the most capacity per dollar, so to speak. That's 20% of the market. When we talk about TAM and the growth rate, what percent addressable we can get to-
Right
-that maths out to possibility of getting 20%.
Right.
If you put in the solution element, that puts us beyond that kind of number. So the upside from our perspective on a revenue front is significant. Again, the customer base that'll be coming to us will be enterprise grade-
Right
-more so. The cash conversion cycle on an enterprise customer has always been good for us, so we will be able to generate cash going forward and self-fund that.
Okay. I think one of the terms you used was backlog. We are making sure we are 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. What does that mean, specifically? What specific improvements are you putting in the backlog there?
Specific in our-
Yeah. In your backlog terms. Yeah.
I don't think we've disclosed any of those things, so I'm not-
Okay
-at liberty to say, but I think when we contract with our customers-
Yeah
-we're very clear about terms when they need it-
Okay. Got it.
-what they need, what the solution looks like. I think having that greater integration with a 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 need a couple of boxes, a couple of pizza boxes." Different conversation, it's a deeper one. 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. But I think it's in pretty good shape.
Okay. We have a couple more minutes here. Just want to see if anybody-
Okay
-in the audience has any questions. Oh, great. All right.
What I can say is that we're engaged, and we are shipping those products, and it's early days.
All right. Maybe just one more. As you think about these deployments, these massive deployments, the TAM that you are talking about, has anything changed when it comes to when your customers want these Super Micro servers and solutions, rather, to be deployed? Is it now closer? Has anything changed there, whether it is not just visibility, but from the time they send you an order to the time they want delivery?
I don't think anything is material changed. I think everyone knows what the parameters are for-
Timing.
-timing, because-
Right
-obviously there is an engagement with the partners in the stack to understand how-
Okay
-it is able, when we can do it, and how we can do it.
Okay.
There is a lot of synchronization. That goes back to your double ordering thing. I do not think that this quantum of size is it is not easy to double order anything.
Right. There has been an extension, people giving you orders out, like previously, I don't know, it was six months out, eight, nine months out. Now it is 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 is an order or not is a different thing. So the order number is a much more firmer commitment of when it will be, as opposed to if they are ordering it for a certain period of time. But we know that there is intentions beyond what is on our order book.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. That
But we expect our order book to grow.
Right. Okay. Fine. All right. We're on
NVIDIA is like 80% of your business, perhaps more. AMD is very small. Do you think that will remain the same going forward?
I hate to say it is customer choice, and those numbers can move around depending on orders at any given time. But I think it is important to understand that the solution that NVIDIA is delivering, there is 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. The demand for the solutions, you can see that the application development is 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. There are so many different solutions now, and we are able to deliver all those.
If there is a key takeaway, we are 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.
Taylor, you? Mike, as we are wrapping up, maybe what are investors missing about the Super Micro story?
Well, I think the last point I made was look, there is significant opportunity for us to be the solution provider as we go forward for AI. It is a next generation kind of architecture, and we are well ahead of our competitors in innovation and delivering these solutions. So I think that is a pretty key point.
Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us.