MaxLinear, Inc

Greetings and welcome to the Max Linear Q3 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Leslie Green of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Shamali. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Max Linear's third quarter 2026 financial results. Today's call is being hosted by Dr. Kishore Seendripu, CEO, and Steve Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions. Our comments today include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws including statements regarding our guidance for the fourth quarter of 2026 including revenue, gap and non-gap gross margin, gap and non-gap operating expenses, gap and non-gap interest and other expense, gap and non-gap income taxes, and gap and non-gap diluted share count. In addition, we will make forward-looking statements relating to trends, opportunities, execution of our business plan, and potential growth and uncertainties and various product and geographic markets, including, without limitation, statements concerning the future financial and operating results, opportunities for revenue and market share gains across our target markets, new products, including the timing of production and launches of such products, demand for the adoption of certain technologies, and our total addressable market. These forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties including risks outlined in the risk factor section of our recent SEC filings including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 which we filed today. Any forward-looking statements are made as of today and MaxLinear has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. The third quarter 2026 earnings release is available in the investor relations section of our website at maxlinear.com. In addition, we report certain historical financial metrics, including but not limited to gross margin, income or loss from operations, operating expenses, interest in other expense, and income tax on both the GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We encourage investors to review the detailed reconciliation of our GAAP and non-GAAP presentations and the press release available on our website. We do not provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance for future periods because of the inherent uncertainty associated with our ability to project certain future changes including stock-based compensation and its related tax effects as well as potential impairments. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed today are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable GAAP financial measures. We are providing this information because management believes It is useful to investors as it reflects how management measures our business. Lastly, this call is also being webcast and the replay will be available on our website for two weeks. And now let me turn the call over to Kishore Seendripu, CEO of MaxLinear. Kishore.

Thank you, Leslie, and good afternoon, everyone. As the ongoing AI infrastructure build-out momentum continues, and as AI data center clusters continue to scale to unprecedented size and bandwidth requirements, we believe MaxLinear is emerging as a key enabler of next-generation connectivity technologies. Demand for our optical data center connectivity and infrastructure solutions continues to strengthen and we believe MaxLinear is in the early innings of a multi-year AI-driven growth cycle. Against this backdrop, our AI data center business continues to outperform our expectations. In Q3, overall revenue grew 72% year-on-year, driven by accelerating adoption of our optical PAM4 products, expanding customer engagements, and strong execution across our infrastructure portfolio. Infrastructure as a category grew 210% year-on-year, which is now larger than the rest of our revenue categories combined. Reflecting this momentum, we are raising our 2026 Optical Data Center revenue outlook to $250 million to $270 million. With strong visibility in bookings extending beyond 2027, we expect another significant step up in revenue next year. Keystone, our 5 nanometer CMOS, 100 gigabit per lane PAM430's family, continues to ramp rapidly in high-volume production across multiple hyperscalers. Its industry-leading power efficiency and performance position MaxLinear at the center of today's 800 gig optical infrastructure deployments. Looking ahead, we are seeing accelerating customer activity around Rushmore-based 200 gigabit per lane PAMP4 1.6 terabit architectures where qualification programs are advancing toward expected production deployments in 2027. Rushmore is building on Keystone's foundational success and is also expected to become a major multiyear growth driver. Big Sky, our family of next generation 400 gigabit per lane, 3.2 terabit optical and electrical PAMP for interconnect technologies will further catalyze growth as data center network speeds continue to accelerate beyond 200 gigabit per lane. Beyond PAM-430's optics, we continue to broaden our AI infrastructure footprint across optical and electrical interconnects, retimers, control plane connectivity, telemetry, and power management. This strong expansion of content inside the AI data center stack positions MaxLinear to participate across multiple layers of future AI data center architectures. Already, Annapurna, our 1.6TB electrical interconnects product family, addresses 1.6TB active electrical cable and on-board retimer applications for AI scale-up. Washington, our 200 gigabit per lane TIA platform, not only supports PAM4 DSP-based optics, but also non-DSP-based linear pluggable optics consisting of LRO, LPO, NPO, and CPO solutions. We expect initial Washington and Annapurna revenues in 2027, followed by a stronger volume ramp in 2028. We are also excited about our AI RAC Commander portfolio consisting of USB, PCIe, UART connectivity bridges used for telemetry, power management, and protection solutions for RAC-scale AI infrastructure. RAC Commander expands our role beyond data movement and into the control plane of the AI data center. Customers require advanced telemetry monitoring, connectivity, and power control capabilities to maximize performance and efficiency, which is critical for infrastructure management. We believe this represents a significant long-term growth opportunity while expanding our strategic footprint. Additionally, our XGS PON hyperscale data center design win, which serves as the control plane connectivity network across multiple data centers, has completed qualification. Supported by secured backlog, we expect first deployments of this inter-data center control plane solution to start in 2027. Separately, Panther, our storage accelerator platform, continues to gain momentum as customers seek more efficient AI infrastructure. By significantly increasing effective storage utilization and unlocking KV cache capacity for agentic AI applications, Panther enables customers to support larger AI inference workloads without increasing storage infrastructure spending. We expect Panther revenue to roughly double this year with potential for another meaningful increase in 2027. While AI data center remains our primary growth driver, we expect edge AI driven upgrades to also drive growth in 2027 and 2028 for our wireless infrastructure and broadband access and connectivity solutions. These include Sierra single-chip 5G RAN remote radio unit solution, our millimeter-wave and microwave backhaul RF and modem SOCs, and XGS PON fiber broadband home gateways. Both broadband and connectivity categories delivered sequential revenue growth in Q3, driven by large-scale deployments of fiber PON and Wi-Fi 7 gateways at major Tier 1 service providers in North America and Europe. In closing, accelerating hyperscale deployments, increasing optical connectivity content, new product ramps, and broader participation across the AI infrastructure stack give us confidence that MaxLinear is still in the early stages of a significant growth cycle. Our strategy is focused on strengthening our leadership in high-speed data center connectivity, expanding into adjacent infrastructure markets, and increasing our content share and strategic relevance with hyperscale customers. With strong customer momentum, great backlog visibility, and a differentiated technology portfolio, we believe MaxLinear is well-positioned to deliver sustained growth and long-term shareholder value. With that, let me turn the call over to Steve Litchfield, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. Steve?