Astera Labs, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Carly, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Estera Labs Q425 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After management's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I'll now turn the call over to Leslie Green, investor relations for Astera Labs. Leslie, you may begin.

Thank you, Carly. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Astera Labs fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining us on the call today are Jitendra Mohan, chief executive officer and co-founder, Sanjay Gajendra, president and chief operating officer and co-founder, and Mike Tate, chief financial officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that certain comments made in this call today may include forward-looking statements regarding, among other things, expected future financial results, strategies and plans, future operations, and the markets in which we operate. These forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs, expectations, and assumptions about future events, which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that are discussed in detail in today's earnings release And in the periodic reports and filings, we file from time to time with the SEC, including the risks set forth in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K. It is not possible for the company's management to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on these forward-looking statements or the extent to which any factor or combination of factors may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, the results, events, or circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements discussed during this call may not occur, and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated or implied. All of our statements are made based on information available to management as of today, and the company undertakes no obligation to update such statements after the date of this call except as required by law. Also during this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we consider to be an important measure of the company's performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are provided in addition to, and not as a substitute for, financial results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is available in the earnings release we issued today, which can be accessed through the investor relations portion of our website. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Jitendra Mohan, CEO of Astera Labs. Jitendra.

Thank you, Leslie. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our fourth quarter conference call for fiscal year 2025. Today, I'll provide an overview of our Q4 and full year 2025 results, followed by a discussion around the current trends within the AI infrastructure markets. I will then turn the call over to Sanjay to walk through Astera Labs' near and long-term growth profile. Finally, Mike will give an overview of our Q4 2025 financial results and provide details regarding our financial guidance for Q1 2026. Astera Labs delivered strong results in Q4 with revenue at $270.6 million, up 17% from the prior quarter and up 92% versus Q4 of last year. For full year 2025, revenue was $852.5 million, up 115% versus the prior year. Growth within the quarter and for the year was broad-based, spanning across our signal conditioning, smart cable module, and switch fabric product portfolios as we continue to diversify our business profile with several new design wins across multiple customers. Secular trends remain robust within the AI and cloud infrastructure space, supported by exceptionally strong spending commentary coming from the top U.S. hyperscalers, with Google and AWS alone guiding nearly $400 billion in total CapEx spending for 2026. We are benefiting from this increased spending both in the near term and long term. Furthermore, the market opportunity for our intelligent connectivity platform is substantially larger than we initially anticipated, encompassing multiple product lines, physical media types, form factors, and protocols, for both standard and custom applications. Starting with Scorpio, our P Series family continued its volume ramp at our lead customers with growth coming from both existing and incremental platform designs. For the full year, Scorpio P Series exceeded our target of 10% of revenue and remains the only PCIe 6 fabric shipping in volume in the market. Looking into 2026, we anticipate continued growth for Scorpio P Series at our lead customers as well as commencing shipments into at least two additional major hyperscalers on their next generation AI platforms. Moving to Scorpio X series, we expect to incrementally grow revenue in the first half of 2026, followed by a transition to high volume production in the second half of 2026. We continue to make excellent progress with additional engagements looking to leverage PCIe for scale-up networking. As previously communicated, we are engaged with 10-plus customers for Scorpio X family, and our current expectation is that we will ship initial quantities of Scorpio X series to support new customer platforms in the second half of 2026, with volume ramps set for 2027. Solid traction continues to develop with respect to UV-Link, with a vibrant ecosystem including product announcements, broad IP availability, and compliance methodologies being finalized. Decent public roadmap announcements from AWS and AMD, along with other ongoing engagements, indicate a broad adoption. UA-Link remains the highest performance, lowest latency, fully open solution for AI scale of connectivity, and we will be ready to intercept the initial customer platform ramps in 2027. Our ARIES portfolio continues to perform well, with PCIe 6 solutions contributing robust growth during the quarter, and the overall portfolio growing nearly 70% year-over-year in 2025. The demand for ARIES is driven by increasing deployments of custom AI accelerators at large hyperscalers. Our ARIES Gen 6 products are the industry's only PCI-6 DSP retimer solutions shipping to customers in high volume today, and we are well positioned to maintain our leadership role in the market. We remain very early in the PCIe 6 transition cycle and anticipate additional customers will launch PCIe 6 capable AI accelerators and systems throughout 2026 and into 2027. As a result, we expect our Aries product line to continue growing in 2026 and beyond. Doris was our strongest performing product family during Q4 as new programs began shipping in volume to support designs across both AI and general purpose systems. In 2025, we saw Taurus revenue grow by more than 4x year over year, driven by a breadth of 400 gig designs that will serve as a baseline for continued growth in 2026. We look for the transition to 800 gig switching platforms to be the next catalyst for market expansion, driving further growth opportunities for Taurus. Finally, we made good progress with our Leo CXL memory expansion products in 2025 and look to build upon that in 2026. We are excited to announce our partnership with Microsoft, Intel, and SAP to enable customers to evaluate CXL memory expansion capabilities for their specific workloads within Microsoft Azure M series virtual machines. This program represents the industry's first publicly announced deployment of CXL attached memory, and we expect initial production volumes to commence in the second half of 2026. Overall, we are proud of the progress we have made in 2025. We added new product lines to service more sockets and address custom applications, increased the dollar content per accelerator, diversified our customer base with new designing, and scaled our operations. This progress and a strong track record of technology and operational execution has helped us forge tight relationships with key AI and cloud infrastructure providers. As an example, an update on our relationship with Amazon can be found in our 8K file today. Looking at the combination of growing AI infrastructure deployments and the increasing complexity of high-speed interconnect architectures is poised to drive significant growth for the AI connectivity space. We estimate our self-addressable market opportunity will expand by more than 10x over the next five years to reach $25 billion. This market opportunity spans our existing and announced copper-based product families, including Aries and Taurus signal conditioning solutions, Scorpio AI Fabric switches, US EXL memory controllers, and our recently announced custom solutions for scale-up connectivity. While these numbers and opportunities are substantial and exciting, there is a significant amount of work that needs to be done. Astera Labs is deeply committed to building an A-plus team with an execution mindset and capabilities essential to support our customers' technology roadmap and maximize our share of the large market opportunity ahead of us. Therefore, we are strategically investing in the expansion of our team and capabilities to execute against a broadening set of revenue opportunities generated by our customers. We took an exciting step in this direction this week with the announcement of a significant expansion in our global engineering operations through the establishment of an advanced design center in Israel. Our investment in this talented ASIC engineering team substantially increases our resource pool and will help accelerate development of cutting-edge, high bandwidth and custom AI fabric, and emerging AI inference technology. I would like to take a moment to thank our global team of Asterians, our partners, and our vendors who worked tirelessly in 2025 to deliver world-class AI connectivity solutions to the market. Their steadfast focus and effort have placed Astera Labs in a position of strength heading into 2026 as we continue solving next-generation AI connectivity challenges. Finally, we announced today that Mike Tate will transition from the CFO role into a full-time role as a strategic advisor reporting to me. Mike has been instrumental in Estella Labs' growth and development since inception, and we are very grateful for his many contributions. We are also very excited to announce Desmond Lynch will join Estella Labs as our new CFO effective March 2nd. Desmond brings great semiconductor financial experience to the company, and we look forward to drawing on his expertise as we enter our next phase of growth. We're also thankful that Mike will continue to work full-time in his new role to support the company and ensure a smooth transition to Desmond. With that, let me turn the call over to our President and COO, Sanjay Gajendra, to outline our vision for growth over the next several years.

Thanks, Jitendra, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I want to provide an update on our recent execution followed by an overview of the meaningful market opportunities that will fuel our growth over the next several years. SR Labs' mission is to deliver a purpose-built, intelligent connectivity platform with a portfolio of solutions, including silicon, hardware, and software for rack-scale AI deployments. Over the past several years, we have been building our portfolio expanding our capabilities with foundational IP, growing our talent pool, and demonstrating the technical and operational execution which has helped us to establish multi-generational partnerships with leading AI platform and cloud service providers. Looking ahead, we plan to deliver technology enhancements to our core portfolio of AI fabric, signal conditioners, and memory controllers while also expanding our breadth of capabilities to new categories, including custom connectivity solutions, products to address memory bottlenecks in inference applications, optical engines, and other optical solutions for scale-up and scale-out networks. Let me now provide an update on our future product strategy. Starting with AI fabrics, we have been thrilled with the initial traction of Scorpio P-Series and X-Series for the last 18 months. Looking into 2026, we are poised to see diversification with our P-Series solutions for head node connectivity at new hyperscaler customers in addition to the volume ramp of our X-Series solutions for scale-up networking. Exiting 2026, we expect Estera Labs to continue being the market's leading provider of PCIe 6 switching solutions and will become a leading provider of merchant scale-up AI fabrics. Our early engagements have been crucial to our understanding of the nuances of deploying complex AI fabrics at scale, while also identifying new and innovative approaches to expand our roadmap. Furthermore, Hyperscalers are demanding flexible connectivity solutions optimized for their unique architectural approaches and application needs, i.e. one size does not fit all. These requirements lend themselves to our software-defined architecture for silicon products, which will now extend to wider Radix configuration, multi-protocol support, in-network computing, and ultimately the incorporation of photonic switch-to-accelerator links. These new requirements, coupled with larger XPU cluster sizes, are expanding the merchant scale-up switching market opportunity, which we believe will grow to roughly $20 billion annually by 2030. Our current roadmap across PCIE, UA-Link, and platform-specific scale-up topologies put us in full position to service at least half of this market merchant silicon opportunity in the near to medium term with aspirations to address the entire market opportunity over the next several years. Moving to our signal conditioning portfolio, we saw tremendous growth in 2025 with both ADs and TOROs. Looking into 2026, we anticipate strong additional growth fueled by robust secular trends and technology evolution. Across the portfolio, we are well positioned to benefit from forthcoming protocol specification upgrades for PCIe and Ethernet that will double bandwidth capabilities and therefore drive additional reach extension content. Given the market size and growth rate, we'll continue to heavily invest in these portfolios with current development stretching out to PCIe Gen 7, UV-linked 200 gig, and 1.60 Ethernet applications. We remain well positioned as market leaders in both arenas, and we look to leverage our AI fabric engagements to drive additional opportunities within these categories. During Q4, we announced an expansion of our product portfolio to include custom connectivity solutions to address next-generation AI infrastructure featuring heterogeneous compute resources. Our initial prospects in the custom solution space will help to enable NVIDIA's NVLink Fusion scale-up architecture for hybrid racks, and we are seeing opportunities to support additional hyperscalers to provide interconnect flexibility and optionality. Through close collaboration with hyperscaler customers and leveraging a broad range of foundational technologies and operational expertise, S3 Labs is well positioned to provide a broad set of solutions tailored to custom applications. Next, we are working closely with key customers to define, develop and build optical connectivity engines for scale-up networking. These silicon photonic solutions will ultimately help to enhance both our AI fabric and signal conditioning portfolios as XPU cluster density scales. We believe that transition to optical connectivity for scale-up applications will be additive to the overall AI networking market size. with copper and optical link coexisting from a system standpoint. This could more than double the merchant's scale-up switching opportunity. Additionally, the discrete high density connectors added through our X-scale acquisition are seeing strong interest and are being qualified for scale-up applications. Along with our expanding portfolio of AI platform solutions, we continue to make meaningful progress towards further diversifying our cloud infrastructure customer base. In 2025, we are seeing customer activity and engagement accelerate across all product categories as AI and cloud providers look to Estella Labs to help solve their next generation infrastructure challenges. Many of these engagements have converted to design events and will meaningfully broaden revenue across multiple hyperscalers as we exit 2026. In conclusion, SR Labs has arrived at a critical inflection point. Strong fundamental momentum has been generated over the past several years with solid execution helping to build mature multi-generation customer relationships. Robust secular trends within RAC-scale AI infrastructure and criticality of intelligent connectivity solutions are catalysts for a material expansion of our market opportunities. These factors give us the confidence to reinvest in ourselves, our customers, and our partners to drive the deployment of AI infrastructure. We look forward to scaling our team with a continued strong emphasis on execution and invest to deliver on our RAC scale vision throughout 2026. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Mike Tate, who will discuss our Q4 financial results and our Q1 outlook.

Thanks, Sanjay, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. This overview of our Q4 financial results and Q1 guidance will be on a non-GAAP basis. The primary difference in Acera Labs non-GAAP metrics is stock-based compensation, acquisition-related costs, and its related income tax effects. Please refer to today's press release available on the investor relations section of our website for more details on both our GAAP and non-GAAP Q1 financial outlook as well as a reconciliation of our gap to non-gap financial measures presented on this call. For Q4 of 2025, Astera Labs delivered quarterly revenue of $270.6 million, which was up 17% versus the previous quarter and 92% higher than the revenue of Q4 of 2024. During the quarter, we enjoyed revenue growth from our Scorpio, Aries, and Taurus product lines, supporting both scale up and scale out, PCIe and Ethernet connectivity for a wide range of AI rack level configurations. Scorpio P series demand for PCIe Gen 6 switching applications was robust during Q4. Scorpio X series shipped pre-production quantities during the quarter. Aries demonstrated growth during the quarter with Aries 6 revenue growing strongly as we began shipping PCIe Gen 6 SCMs for scale-up topologies in high volume. Taurus displayed strong growth during the quarter, driven by the ramp of new 400 gig programs for scale-out connectivity for both AI systems and general purpose platforms. Q4 non-GAAP gross margin was 75.7%. It was down 70 basis points from the September quarter levels, primarily due to a higher mix of hardware sales. Non-GAAP operating expenses for Q4 was $96 million, were up $16 million from the previous quarter due to the continued expansion of our R&D organization, including the X-scale acquisition that closed during the quarter. Within Q4 non-GAAP operating expenses, R&D expenses were $70.7 million. Sales and marketing expenses were $11.1 million, and general and administrative expenses were $14.2 million. Non-GAAP operating margins for Q4 was 40.2%. down 150 basis points from the previous quarter. Interest income in Q4 was $12 million. Our non-GAAP tax rate for Q4 was 13%. Non-GAAP fully diluted share count for Q4 was 181.2 million shares, and our non-GAAP diluted earnings per share for the quarter was 58 cents. Cash flow from operating activities for Q4 was $95.3 million. And we ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $1.19 billion. Now turning to our guidance for Q1 of fiscal 2026. We expect Q1 revenues to increase to within a range of $286 million and $297 million, up roughly 6% to 10% from the fourth quarter levels. For Q1, we expect ARIES growth to be driven by a variety of AI platforms across both scale-up and scale-out connectivity. Taurus growth is expected to be driven by increased volumes of 400-gig designs for AI scale-out connectivity. Scorpio growth will be primarily driven by the continued deployment of our P-series solutions for scale-out applications and initial volumes of our Scorpio X-series for scale-up switching. We expect Q1 non-GAAP gross margins to be approximately 74%, with the increased mix of our hardware-based solutions in the quarter. We expect first quarter non-GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of approximately $112 million to $118 million. As previously outlined, our customers continue to present us with numerous large revenue opportunities for AI connectivity solutions. The planned increase in operating expenses will enable us to capitalize on these opportunities. This guidance includes expenses related to an awkward hire transaction we closed this quarter, which helped us rapidly scale our recently announced Israel Design Center. Interest income is expected to be approximately $11 million. Our non-GAAP tax rate should be approximately 12%. Our non-GAAP fully diluted share count is expected to be approximately 184 million shares. Adding this all up, we are expecting non-GAAP fully diluted earnings per share to be approximately 53 cents to 54 cents. Lastly, I would like to welcome Desmond as our new incoming CFO, and I believe is a perfect fit for the company at this exciting stage of the company's growth trajectory. I look forward to continue to support the company in my new role while also ensuring a smooth CFO transition. This concludes our prepared remarks, and once again, we appreciate everyone joining the call, and now we will open the line for questions. Operator?

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from Blaine Curtis with Jefferies.

hey guys good afternoon thanks for my question congrats on the results and congrats mike on the the new role um i i just want to ask you obviously this this warrant uh 6.5 billion is a huge number so i might already know the answer but i wanted to ask you about seems like one of the biggest debates is still the acceptance of ua link for these next gen designs uh you mentioned two lead customers mentioning it i'm just kind of curious as people think about you know, your UA-Link switch opportunity, particularly at your largest customer versus, you know, the custom connectivity and maybe them using MB-Link. I'm just kind of curious with this deal, is there any better visibility? If you can kind of think about, you know, that mix between hybrid boxes and native UA-Link for these ideally customer.

Thanks, Blaine. Maybe let me start and then Mike can chime in on the warrant itself. So, yes, clearly, AWS announced at reInvent that the Tranium 4, which is slated to ramp in 2027, will support UA-Link, which was a very positive endorsement of UA-Link, as well as support for NB-Link fusion. Subsequently, AMD has also announced that their MI500 series will also support UA-Link again in 2027. So, these are two very good public announcements in support of UA-Link, and there are several other discussions that are ongoing. Eulink ecosystem is humming. We've got great availability of IP, a lot of vendor announcements and so on. And so we will be ready with our Eulink solution to intercept the ramp that happens in 2027. Now for NB-Link Fusion, this also represents a meaningful opportunity for us. And then before we jump into what the opportunity is, I do want to call out the fact that both Amazon, the hyperscaler, as well as NVIDIA have chosen Estera as a partner. And that's a very important, you know, statement in terms of the trust that they place in a sterile lab. So the opportunity itself is to take the native protocol that the XPU or the ASIC speaks and translate that into NVLink. This is a sophisticated function, and we have a solution that we will deploy to address this. And given the fact that the solution attaches to the XPU on a one-is-to-one basis, We anticipate the overall revenues to be in line with a switched opportunity where we might be selling a UA-Link switch. So all in all, exact mix of, you know, how much NVLink fusion would be deployed versus a native solution would be deployed remains to be seen. But for us, the opportunity is roughly the same for both.

Yeah, and just to point out, we did file under a warrant agreement with Amazon today. It demonstrates our strong relationship with Amazon. Under the terms of the warrant agreement, we're issuing 3.3 million warrant shares that best upon the achievement of performance conditions comprises specified tranches of payments to purchase up to $6.5 billion of our smart fabric stitches, signal conditioning products, and also our optical engine solutions.

Thanks, I actually wanted to ask you in the last part, I thought it was interesting, you've been talking more about optical, you know, it's part of that Warren Agreement. Can you maybe just talk about, you talked about it doubling your TAM, maybe timing on that?

So we think that when we think of the optical for scale up, the timing should be somewhere in 2028. We do believe that the initial deployment for optical technology, CPO in particular, might happen with scale out and that might precede the deployment of scale up.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from Joe Moore with Morgan Stanley.

Great. Thank you. You talked a little bit about the OPEX increase. I guess it's a pretty big step function up. Can you talk about was the acquisition a part of that and it was small and then you know, as you look out to these optical scale-up aspirations, I assume that's expensive. Just kind of any incremental sense of, you know, why the OPEX is coming up so much so quickly.

Yeah, Joe, over the last couple of quarters, we've been coming, having a lot of advanced dialogue with our customers, and they're presenting us significant revenue opportunities that, you know, we really feel now is the time to really invest in. You know, as we spoke on the call, The TAM is much bigger than we originally expected, just, you know, when we measured it just 12, 18 months ago. So we are increasing our investments to pursue these opportunities. Last quarter in Q4, we did close the X scale acquisitions, and now we have a full quarter in Q1. And then just recently in this quarter, we closed another aqua hire where we got a very sizable, capable team. to help us scale up our new Israel Design Center, where we just also brought in very exciting, capable leadership as well. So this is all to pursue these opportunities that our customers are pushing us to develop for them.

Okay, thank you. And then you talked about UA Link. I know there was also a fair amount of noise over the course of the quarter about ESON, Ethernet scale-up. Can you just kind of talk about the handicapping those two technologies and how you see those technologies coexisting going forward.

So the scale-up networking, Joel, that remains a very large market, and it will include proprietary approaches such as NVLink or Google's ACI, and will also include the merchant and standard approaches such as PCI Express, ULink, Ethernet, and Ethernet. What we are seeing is that hyperscalers are going to leverage the type of solutions that their software stack is designed for. So, for example, if a customer is using a memory-centric protocol, like NVLink or like PCI Express, they are likely to continue to use that and transition to UA-Link as those solutions become available. At the same time, the customers that are using Ethernet are likely to stay with Ethernet and then maybe move to Ethernet when Ethernet becomes available. This is overall a very big market, and there is a lot of room for different solutions to coexist. And we do indeed think that these solutions will coexist. We are primarily developing solutions where our customers are asking us to, which happens to be PCI Express, ULINK, and now increasingly on NVLink Fusion.

Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Vivek Arya with Bank of America.

Thanks for taking my question. On Scorpio, I'm curious if it achieved that 20% of sales, I think, milestone that you had set in Q4, and if it did, is this kind of 200-ish million, you know, with this 200-ish million run rate, where do you see the outlook for Scorpio, you know, at a high level for 2026?

Yeah, Scorpio continues to perform very well. You know, it just launched for the first time in Q2 of this year, and it It did break above our 15% for the year, and it grew very nicely. This is all on the Scorpio P primarily, which is scale out switching. We did say we just started to ship initial volumes here in Scorpio X, and that will have increasing volumes as we enter into 2026 with a much more material ramp in the back half of the year. Um, so, you know, you know, Scorpio by far is our biggest team right now. So it, it, uh, it's, it's, um, you know, it's growing at a very fast clip as a result of that.

Okay. And for my, uh, follow up, um, how do you see your content as NVIDIA moves to the Vera Rubin generation versus the, uh, Blackwell, um, generation, um, right. Um, and, and how do you see. Wherever the NVIDIA racks are deployed in the Vera Rubin, do you think they let them capture more of their proprietary content, or do you still see enough opportunity for Estera wherever Vera Rubin is installed? Thank you.

Yeah, great question. So as we have established now that the opportunity for Estera arises, When our customers do custom deployments of the Grace Blackwell or in the future Vera Rubin reference design, we have very minimal opportunity with the reference design itself. The initial ramps that Mike just referred to were happening as part of these customized deployment of Grace Blackwell platform by our lead hyperscaler customers. And as the hyperscaler customer announced at the public event, they want to continue to deploy Vera Rubin also as a custom deployment. So we will certainly do our best to make sure that we are part of their solution as well as the design transition from Grace Blackwell to Veraruga. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Tori Swanberg with Stifel.

Yes, thank you. Congratulations on the results and Mike, congratulations on your new role. I had a follow-up question for Sanjay. Sanjay, when you talked about the SEM by 2030, 20 billion, you'll be able to get half of that today. But you said, you know, PCIe link and then platform-specific scale-up topologies. And I'm just curious, is the world changing a little bit where, you know, there's less reliance on standards and there's more platform-specific scale-up initiatives? And is that also why you are stepping up your OPEX as much as you are this quarter?

Yeah, so if you think of a scale-up topology, you're interconnecting accelerators And to that standpoint, the accelerators could be a merchant silicon or could be an internal custom . And because these are homogeneous links and everyone is trying to eke out the maximum amount of bandwidth and performance on the connectivity side. So in general, what you will expect is there is quite a bit of customization that will be needed. With Astera, we are unique in the sense that our fabrics are designed to be software-defined in the sense that they can be updated to do certain things that are custom and optimized for the specific scale-up topology. So what we have tried to do is not do one silicon for every opportunity, but to be able to leverage the same piece of silicon, but to be able to customize that in many different ways. So in some ways, we are making sure that the investment that we do is managed and the differentiation comes from software rather than keep doing a unique silicon for everyone. Now, having said that, the thing that we are seeing is a tremendous influx of opportunities. And that's largely coming from the fact that we have spent about 12 to 15 months sort of being in the scale of domain and we have learned a lot. There's a lot of unique things that become critical when you're designing KLOP fabrics. And that learning has enabled us to better present our solution as well as the feature set that we're incorporating in our new product lines. And those are gaining interest and support from several new customers. And to support that is where we see a need to step up our R&D meaning the time to invest is now. And this will help us as we think about the longer-term growth of the company as well as our position in the scale-up market.

That's great, Pallar. Thank you. And I've got a follow-up for you, Jitendra. Just to clarify, I think you said Scorpio X. So pre-production is still first half of this year. Then you start the ramp. with your lead customer second half. But I think you also said that you expect to have some pre-production with additional customers beyond your lead customer in the second half with ramps and 27. Just want to make sure that I got that right.

Yeah, that's correct. There is a lot of traction for the Scorpio X family. For customers who are trying to use PK Express and the memory centric protocol further scale up. We are fielding so many different costs, and we expect some of those to get qualified towards the end of this year and then ramp in 27.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Ross Seymour with Deutsche Bank.

Hi, guys. Thanks for asking the question, and Mike, congrats on the new role. You'll be missed. I guess my first question is on the OPEX side of things. You're basically spending about $100 million run rate more than you were prior. I get that the revenue opportunity is larger, but can you give us a little bit of idea on what the time to revenue would be in this when you say now's the time to invest? I know the 2030 numbers are big, but is that when today's investment pays off, or should we expect things sooner than that? Just any more color on the OPEX would be helpful.

Yeah, there's a range, but the technology that we're developing does have a longer lead time, but there are new opportunities that can be turned into silicon in relatively shorter, and then you have the qualification process with the customers. But you could see from start to revenues in 18, 24 months on the earlier side. But also keep in mind, we've been looking at optical from the inception of the company, knowing that at some point, It was going to be very important as a connectivity supplier. So we've been putting the pieces together internally and including the new acquisition that we had last year. But, you know, we're building something internal that, you know, other companies, you know, are paying billions of dollars for, you know, to get externally. So and by doing this, we're doing it the right way. And we're building it this daring way, along with input from our customers. So we're Our development is closely aligned with input from our customers as well.

Thanks for that, Mike. I guess as my follow-up to the Scorpio family, I believe you said it crossed 15% of sales in 2025. So I just wanted to clarify if that was true. But perhaps more importantly, any sort of bogeys as far as the growth rate this year? I believe in the past you talked about it would cross over and become your biggest product line at some point this year. Is that still the case? Any updates on those sorts of timing and magnitude?

Yeah, so we originally set up for a 10% bogey. We did cross above 15% for 2025. And again, that's all just P-series. X for scale up is a much bigger, larger TAM for us. And we're starting to shift initial volumes in the first half, but the more material step up in the back half. So the combination of those two We'll put us on a trajectory for it to be our biggest product line. But Aries and Taurus and Leo are all growing as well. So it's hard to know exactly when it'll cross over. But definitely at some point, it will. And it's going to drive very good revenue growth for us. Thanks, Blake.

Your next question comes from Sebastian Nachi with William Blair.

Great, thank you for taking the question and congrats on the results. Just in terms of the more customized solutions that you're building, is it right to think that your average ASP for the solution or the content opportunity should go up meaningfully versus some of your existing products? And is there anything to call out in terms of maybe a different margin or different profitability profile for those solutions?

And to confirm, you're referring to the Scorpio X?

That's right, that's right.

or the custom so you didn't hear the first part yes for for the customized uh solutions that you're building for some of your hyperscaler customers yeah so the custom solutions that we build like for example the the NVLink fusion opportunity that we noted um so the the engagement model of course tends to be different but the attached rate will will also tend to be higher so I think from a volume standpoint, it will be at a certain rate. But the ASPs, there will be some considerations that have to be applied because there will be blocks that will come from the partners that we work with. So end of the day, I think like Jitendra highlighted, when it comes to our revenue content, both based on a native switch versus a custom solution, Things sort of even up, where on the native switches, it tends to be one switch being shared across a few accelerators, whereas in the custom solution type of products, you're doing it one per accelerator, which means that you'll have a higher attach rate, although the ASP might not be at the same level.

I may add, Sebastian, in general, a helpful thing that we have found is every generation of XPU content has grown up so far. And we continue to head in that direction, having more dollar content per XPU generation.

Got it. Okay. That's really helpful. And maybe as a quick follow-up, just on the Taurus line, is there a way to think about how much of the strong growth we're seeing there is coming from just strong underlying market growth versus Astaire's ability to gain share in that market?

I want to say both, but definitely the speeds have gone up from 400 to 800 gig. The need for active components, whether it's on board or within cables in the form of AC is growing. So that fact is not changing. Our business model is slightly different. As probably you're aware, we don't do the whole cable. We do the modules that go inside the cable assemblies and rely on our cable partners to provide the at-scale deployment with multiple vendors supporting the same opportunities. So to that standpoint, what I would say is that we are seeing that transition happening. You can see that with some of the numbers that we shared today. Our Taurus revenue has gone up. and generally for the whole year it's about 4X. So we expect that trend to continue. Again, we won't be called in on day one because of the business model that we have, but as volume picks up, even for 800 gigs, what we're expecting is that Estera will come in strong with multiple cable suppliers using our module to support the high-volume band.

Great. That's really helpful. Thank you.

Your next question is from Sean Laughlin with TD Cowan.

Hey, good afternoon, guys. And thanks for letting me take the question. I have a question and congrats on nice results. And Mike, congrats on your retirement and hopefully a little bit of an easier new role at the company here. I wanted to ask on the warrant agreement and maybe get some background on sort of One, you know, there's a, there's a period of, of exercise to 2033, I believe. And then, you know, there's a dollar amount associated with it to the extent that you're able to talk about sort of what drove the, you know, the two companies to reach the agreement. And is this, should we think about this as, as maybe like incremental to what you already had expected to be doing with that customer over that timeframe? And then anything you could give on linearity, that'd be great. Thanks.

Yeah, I can't go into much more detail than what we publicly disclosed. In the AK, we did file the full warrant agreement, so you can get some of the more material terms out of that filing. It does demonstrate the strong relationship that we have with Amazon. This is a follow-on warrant. We've had a previous warrant agreement in place. And what happens is the warrants are earned as revenue milestones are achieved, which is the $6.5 billion that we outlined. To account for the warrant, you do take a non-cash charge for the value of what vests, and that goes directly against revenue and effectively directly against gross margins as well. So as the warrants are achieved, we are kind of modeling a non-cash hit to gross margins of about two points a quarter, starting kind of in the Q2 timeframe. But the warrants have a lifelike outline for seven years.

Great, thanks. And if I could ask another question, unfortunately financial uh follow-up on the mblink fusion agreements and whether it's with amazon or whether it's with um you know any other hyperscaler that might adopt that that topology um what is the what does that financial arrangement look like is that a license that the hyperscaler is paying directly to nvidia and and they sort of uh grant you the the ip or is that a Is that something that gets incorporated into the ASP and the margin profile of that product?

Yeah, yeah. And obviously, we can't answer that question just given all the NDAs and other things that we need to be respectful of. In general, what I would say is that it opens up a completely new set of opportunities for us to play in the NVLink ecosystem, which we did not have a play so far. So to that standpoint, this is additive to everything that we're talking about. In terms of the exact business model, I think we'll let hyperscalers or NVIDIA provide more color.

Okay, great.

Thanks again, guys.

Our next question comes from Carl Ackerman with BNP Paribas.

Yes, Mike, you know that some of the increase in OpEx is being driven by your investments in optical and follows your acquisition of AIX scale. Do you anticipate your customer opportunity for integrating your optical glass covered technology is larger for a switch portfolio than your serial conditioning and SCM products?

I have a follow-up. Yeah, I mean, I would maybe let me take that and then Mike can chime in afterwards. I would say that the opportunity for including optical into scale-up is actually a very large opportunity, probably larger than the signal conditioning opportunity that we have, of the order of what we are saying for scale-up fabric connectivity. We have not quite sized it up exactly, but it is a very large opportunity, and we are working very closely with our customers to understand what their requirements are and what their timeframes are, and we'll be ready to intercept those. We believe for scale up in particular, that's likely to be in 2028. Thank you. Go ahead.

Also, just to maybe add to that, I know optical is an important area for us to invest in, and we are doing that with some unique architecture and capabilities. I'd also say that the increase in investment we're doing, like Mike outlined, These are also servicing opportunities on the fabric side, which are much more based upon existing engagement. And as customers are seeing the value of what we offer, they're coming back with requests for additional lane count or Radix configurations or features and things like that. So the investment that we're talking about, including the Israel team that we set up, which will focus on AI fabrics, It's all being done in a way that we get the near-term, mid-term, and long-term growth, setting us up nicely for building on the momentum we have and getting to a different scale from a revenue standpoint.

Got it. Very helpful. You indicated that you have Scorpio P design wins now with three hyperscalers, two of which are new. Are your... Scorpio P designs based on custom compute designs, or are they also being designed on custom GPU racks as well? And then clearly you're having traction here, so you can perhaps address the opportunity that you see with Scorpio P extending into 2026. I know there's a lot of focus on Scorpio X, but perhaps you could spend some time on the engagements you have as well as the opportunity that you see on Scorpio P into 2026. Thank you.

Yeah, no, Scorpio P has been really, I mean, it's mostly going into scale-out use cases. Now that we have, you know, granted the chip in reasonable volume over the last three, four quarters, you know, we are seeing additional customers, specifically like we called out two new hyperscalers that have adopted it. They go into production a little bit later towards the end of this year. These design-ins are supporting platforms that are both merchant GPU-based as well as custom accelerators. And we do expect these to add meaningful revenue for us in 2027. But beyond this, again, these are the ones we called out just given the significance of these design-ins. But in general, I want to say for the P-series, you know, ever since we announced it's been a – It's been attracting a lot of customer interest and traction, and we do have several design wins on that in different lane count configurations and so on. So that continues to be a device that has been – I want to say at this point, we are probably still the only one that's in high-volume production with our Gen 6 switches. So it's serving many customers and use cases.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from Srini Pajuri with RBC Capital Markets.

Thank you. And let me echo my congrats to Mike. I look forward to, I guess, continuing to work with you, but it's been a pleasure over the past 20 plus years. My question, you know, there's been a lot of skepticism about the growth of ARIES retimers, and you continue to show that. You know, obviously this segment continues to grow, and you're projecting growth for this year as well. If you could talk to us about what's driving that growth. Is it primarily the units, or is it PCIE6 transition, or is it new customers? And then as we go into 27, 28, how should we think about any potential implications as the market goes from copper to optical?

Yes, so if you think about PCI Express, PCI Express is really the nervous system inside of a server. All of the significant components, whether it's a GPU or a CPU or a NIC card, they talk to each other over PCI Express. And we established an early lead in PCI Express with PCI Express Gen 4, Gen 5, and now extending that into PCI Express Gen 6. We see not only the continued growth in what we call the chip-down applications, but we also see more growth of PCI Express applications in cabled applications where we set up a smart cable module that does give us an uplift in the ASPs. These devices are used in scale-up applications. And again, as we all understand, scale-up is a very rich opportunity where we have multiple connections and a lot of them. So we are definitely benefiting from that trend with PCI Express going from Gen 5 to Gen 6. Now your question about transition from copper to optical. So most of our customers will continue to stay with copper for as long as they can. That has been their preference all this time. We will reach a stage where maybe the reach or the bandwidth is just high enough and is not able to be supported by copper. And in those cases, we do expect a transition to optical, but copper and optical will continue to coexist for a long period of time. The transition to optical will likely come in the form of first like pluggable optics maybe followed by near-package optics, and eventually the holy grail, which is the co-package optics, which, you know, all of us are working towards. But we expect to see the first deployments of co-package optics for a scale-up sometime in the 2028 timeframe.

Okay, got it. And then the other debate, Jitendra, is obviously UA Link versus eSun. I guess hypothetically, if the market, you know, moves more toward eSun, I'm just curious, I mean, do you have the capability to pivot to ETH and if so, how quickly can you do that? And I'm just curious because, again, this is a debate that we can't, you know, answer, you know, sitting here because it's something that's going to happen in the future. But just wondering if the market were to go to ETH and, you know, how do you see your, you know, position, you know, what kind of role do you anticipate playing in that market?

Yeah, so I would say that we are much closer to the action, so we understand who's doing what largely for the initial deployments of the new scale of protocols, whether it's you will link or Ethernet or reason from a capability standpoint is definitely within reach. We can. We can if you choose to design an Eastern based solution we can. However, as has been the trend with the startup, we listen to our customers very closely and so far everybody is telling us to focus on your Lincoln and that's what we are focusing on. As you say, if things were to shift towards the eastern, we certainly have the capability, and with the addition of the additional resources that we are deploying, we can definitely go in the direction of additional solutions. As a matter of fact, I would say over time, our aspiration really is to address the full connectivity time and not just limit to any one particular protocol.

All right. Thank you, Tanu.

Question comes from Quinn Bolton with Nadine Company.

Hi, this is Robert on for Quinn. Thank you for taking the questions. First wanted just to double click more on to the AEC product offering. Can you maybe discuss how qualifications for your 800 gig AECs are progressing? And do you expect to be shipping 800 gig AECs to multiple hyperscalers this year?

So 800 gig is obviously starting to ramp up right now. And to that standpoint, what I can say is that we're very closely engaged with that from a qualification process standpoint. Given our business model, which is slightly different, like I highlighted early on, we come in as the volume starts expanding. So to that standpoint, you can expect a similar transition happening to our business as well with more deployments for 800 gigs. 800 gigs, like we highlighted before, is broad-based, meaning there are multiple customers that are using AECs for 800 gigs. And those are opportunities that we expect to gain from a revenue standpoint.

Thanks for the color there. And then just quickly on Scorpio P, just wanted to double-click a little bit more into that color. Do you expect these additional P-series customers to reach kind of the size and scale, I guess, down the line as volume ramps with them kind of in the second half of the year and beyond? I guess, can these new customers be as big as your main hyperscaler there?

Yes, there is the potential for that.

Thank you.

At least the ones that we called out. Now, there are, like you noted, many P-series opportunities and design events we have. But specifically to the hyperscaler opportunities that we called out, these are mainstream use cases. So, we do expect them to have the revenue impact like what we've had so far. Thank you.

Our final question comes from Tom O'Malley with Barclays.

Hey, guys, thanks for sneaking me in. I just had one quick one and then a longer term one. So you announced two new hyperscalers for PCAE late in 26, you're saying revenue 27. Are those U.S. hyperscalers or those Chinese hyperscalers?

U.S.

Thanks. And then on the longer term, I think you mentioned on the call about the MI500 series supporting UAL. Obviously, the 400 series supports UAL, but it's over Ethernet. Are you saying that the 500 series will be native UAL, or is it still going to be Ethernet supporting UAL? Obviously, that's a big difference in what switches you're using.

Thank you. Yeah, Tom, so I don't want to speak for our AI customer, but if you look at some of the publicly released information, they have said that they will continue to support both, but they've also said that they believe UA-Link Native is the highest performance scale of protocol.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call back over to the presenters for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Carly, and thank you, everyone, for your participation and questions. Please refer to our investor relations website for information regarding upcoming financial conferences and events. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.