Super Micro (SMCI) Q1 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer - Charles Liang
• Chief Financial Officer - Mark Long
• Former Chief Financial Officer - David Weigand
• Senior Vice President of Corporate Development - Michael Staiger

TAKEAWAYS

• Net Sales -- $19.9 billion, representing 298% year-over-year growth and a 79% sequential increase.
• Fiscal 2027 Revenue Guidance -- $72 billion to $82 billion, which was raised from the previous target of $65 billion to $72 billion.
• Non-GAAP Gross Margin -- 12.8%, an expansion of 330 basis points from the first quarter of last year.
• AI Solutions Revenue -- 71% of total revenue, increasing from 59% in the prior quarter.
• OEM Appliance and Large Data Center Revenue -- $14.7 billion, representing 321% year-over-year growth driven by production ramps for AI data center design wins.
• Enterprise and Channel Revenue -- $4.9 billion, reflecting 229% year-over-year growth but a 12% sequential decline.
• Regional Revenue Concentration -- 80% of revenue originated from the United States, which grew 771% year over year.
• Customer Concentration -- One large data center customer accounted for 44% of total revenue during the quarter.
• Deferred Revenue -- Increased by $3.1 billion, primarily due to customers paying in advance of delivery.
• Days Sales Outstanding -- Improved to 36 days from 59 days, reflecting faster collections and customer prepayments.
• Days of Inventory -- Reduced to 74 days from 119 days, driven by faster production and inventory turnaround cycles.
• Cash Conversion Cycle -- Improved 52 days to a 97-day cycle in a single quarter.
• Non-GAAP Diluted EPS -- $1.81, exceeding the company's original guidance range of $1.01 to $1.10.
• Production Capacity -- On track to produce more than 8,000 racks per month by December, including over 4,000 liquid-cooled racks.
• Cash and Cash Equivalents -- $6.9 billion at the end of the quarter.
• Accounts Receivable -- $9.7 billion, with two customers representing 49% and 17% of the total balance.
• Non-GAAP Operating Margin -- 10.9%, compared with 14.3% in the prior quarter.
• Second Quarter Revenue Guidance -- $19.5 billion to $21.5 billion.
• Full Year Gross Margin Outlook -- 11.8% to 12.2%, implying lower margins in the second half of the fiscal year due to product mix.
• Capital Expenditures -- $47 million for the quarter, with guidance of $70 million to $80 million for the second quarter.
• Catch-up Revenue -- $2.3 billion of the quarterly total represented deployments originally scheduled for earlier periods due to customer readiness.

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RISKS

• Liang warned that "key component shortage continue to impact delivery time line across the IT industry, even GPU," noting ongoing supply constraints.
• Long indicated that gross margins in the second half of the fiscal year are expected to be lower than the first half because "AI solutions to move toward the upper end of the 70% to 80% range as the large deployments in our backlog ship and those carry lower gross margin."
• Management acknowledged that "concentration at this level is a consequence of the scale at which AI infrastructure is now being built," as a single customer represented 44% of revenue.

SUMMARY

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ:SMCI) reported record first-quarter revenue of $19.9 billion, a nearly fourfold increase from the prior year. Management attributed the growth to strong demand for AI and IT total solutions, with AI-related products now representing 71% of the total revenue mix. The company raised its full-year revenue guidance to a range of $72 billion to $82 billion and emphasized its Data Center Building Block Solutions strategy, which integrates hardware, software, and services to optimize time to delivery. Under new financial leadership, the company highlighted a significant improvement in working capital efficiency, including a 52-day reduction in its cash conversion cycle funded largely by customer prepayments. Management noted that overall growth remains gated by industry-wide supply constraints and data center readiness rather than customer demand.

• CEO Liang stated, "Super Micro's focus has always been on delivering optimized total solution value to our customers."
• The company is expanding its manufacturing footprint in Silicon Valley and Taiwan to add millions of square feet of automated production space.
• Management reported that inventory and production turnaround time decreased from 100 days to 74 days over the last three quarters, with a long-term target of 50 days.
• CFO Long noted that the company maintains a $1.8 billion receivables purchase facility to provide flexibility in cash timing and credit exposure.
• The company announced strategic partnerships with Cisco, NetApp, and Nutanix to embed its building block architecture deeper into enterprise infrastructure.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

• DCBBS: Data Center Building Block Solutions, the company's modular architecture for server and storage design.
• DLC: Direct Liquid Cooling, a technology used to manage heat in high-density AI server racks.
• Agentic AI: Artificial intelligence systems designed to autonomously perform tasks and achieve specific goals.
• TCO: Total Cost of Ownership, the complete financial estimate of a product's life cycle costs.
• TTD: Time to Delivery, the period required to deliver a completed system to a customer site.
• TTO: Time to Online, the duration from system delivery to full operational compute readiness.
• SuperCloud Composer (SCC): Management software for rack-scale orchestration and hardware facility integration.
• POD: Point of Delivery, a modular and scalable unit of data center infrastructure.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you for standing by. My name is Jen, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Super Micro's First Quarter Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. Joining us today are Charles Liang, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Long, Chief Financial Officer; former Chief Financial Officer, David Weigand; and Michael Staiger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Michael Staiger, you may begin your conference.

Michael Staiger: Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, and welcome to Super Micro's conference call for the first quarter of fiscal 2027. As you heard, with me today are Charles Liang, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Long, Chief Financial Officer; and Former Chief Financial Officer, David Weigand. By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website. Our call is being webcast live on Super Micro's Investor Relations website and will be available for replay until the conference call -- for later to discuss our financial results for the second quarter of fiscal '27.

The content of today's call is Super Micro's property. It can't be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations, including with respect to our business plans and performance, ongoing market trends and future financial results. These are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release, our most recent Form 10-K and Q and the reports that we may file on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All of our statements are made as of today, November 3, 2026, and are based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our prepared remarks, which is posted on our website. Our second quarter fiscal '27 quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, December 11, 2026. With that, let me turn the call over to Charles.

Charles Liang: Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining us today. Following fiscal 2026, where we nearly doubled our annual revenue, fiscal '27 is off to a record start. Q1 revenue reached $19.9 billion, between the high end of our preannouncement and well ahead of our original outlook of $15 billion. This is a great achievement, and it shows more and more customers prefer our AI and IT total solutions. Most importantly, our Data Center Building Block Solution, DCBBS, are central to this growth, driven deep customer trust and preference, enhancing our profitability and creating sustainable long-term shareholder value. For over 30 years, Super Micro's focus has always been on delivering optimized total solution value to our customers.

We will continue leveraging our engineering technology, global resource and the manufacturing capacity with high gear to accelerate the customers' deployment. Moreover, I'm glad that not just large cloud and neocloud, small cloud company, company and organization across enterprise storage, IoT and both country and corporate sovereign verticals are relying on and adopting Super Micro's total solution every day. We have executed our commitment to drive higher bottom line profitability in Q1. Non-GAAP gross margin expanded by 330 basis points year-over-year to 12.8%.

This expansion was driven by a healthier customer mix across enterprise AI and IT accounts, a diverse product line built on our system building blocks and a growing revenue contribution from our higher-margin DCBBS mode, including our DCBBS hardware, software and unique service stacks. This directly aligned with our strategic roadmap to build a sustainable double-digit gross margin model by delivering superior technology innovation, faster TTM and TTD, faster time to market and faster time to deployment, and total solution value.

Proven over more than 2 years in real-world customer deployments, DCBBS delivers 4 key values that nontraditional server OEM and overseas CM can match: first, optimize TTD, time to delivery, by delivering factory test plug-and-play rack scale systems, and DCBBS building blocks complete the solution, including data center management software directly to customer site; second, optimize TTO, time to online, for shortening live compute readiness from quarters to months and further down to weeks; and third, DCBBS maximizes system uptime through building blocks that eliminating thermal power, software and service bottleneck; and number four, lower TCO by slashing energy consumption and facility downtime to accelerate and improve data center profitability.

Whether our customers are building gigawatt scale AI factory or deploying rapid single-container POD solution, Super Micro DCBBS help build AI infrastructure faster, better, greener and at a lower cost to our customers. Because optimized hardware alone cannot run an efficient AI data center, managing thousands of deep core GPU rack require intelligent real-time software orchestration. SuperCloud Composer, SCM (sic) [ SCC ], delivers seamless rack scale management and full stack hardware facility integration. Super Micro Datacenter Manager, SDM, provides complete power and thermal control from individual node up to [ floor ] building infrastructure for end-to-end hardware life cycle management.

And our Super Micro Operation Manager, SOM suite, featuring director and developer console modules, enable bare metal model and; token as service with ease for LLM and agentic AI workloads. Attaching SCM, SDM and SOM directly to our DCBBS portfolio eliminates software fragmentation for our customers. while driving a higher-value software category. Furthermore, SCM enhanced Call Home service now features an AI-driven low-cost diagnosis, significantly improving data center uptime and giving our customers complete operational confidence. Equally critical to our total solution advantage is our new expanded global data center service organization.

Here, our on-site deployment teams backed by R&D engineers and well-trained post-deployment service staff work directly alongside customers' team through [ TL ] service offering to efficiently maximize cluster uptime. By using automated telemetry, our service team continuously monitoring thermal power delivery and node health in real time to solve potential problems before they cause downtime. While our dedicated on-site engineer handle deployment validation and immediate hardware maintenance. This proactive high-touch service model build deeper customer trust, drive high-value recurring service revenue and fulfill our highest commitment, bringing a complete peace of mind to our customers through high-quality infrastructure total solutions. To realize this unmatched [ breadth ] of solution efficiency, our global manufacturing footprint and scale advancing rapidly.

We are actively expanding our physical footprint with major projects underway in Silicon Valley and Taiwan that will add millions of square feet of fully automated production space and for active service bandwidth. Furthermore, we are accelerating our containerized data center production in Asia and U.S.A. Together, our global manufacturing and service network put us on track to produce more than 8,000 orders most powerful racks per month, including over 4,000 DLC racks by this December. On the technology front, Super Micro continues to lead the market across major silicon platforms. We are among the first to market shipping NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks with our DCBBS and DLC-2 liquid-cooled stack.

We recently had also launched the NVIDIA Rubin and Vera Rubin CPU rack, and they are ready to ship now as well. By the way, our optimized DSX POD solutions are also coming soon. For AMD, MI350 and MI355X platform had good demand momentum now still, as we advance to Helios and MI450 total solutions. Additionally, we are progressing Intel Xeon 6+ platform alongside our new Arm AGI CPU-based solutions optimized specifically for agentic AI market. At the same time, we continue to expand our comprehensive Edge and IoT product portfolio, while consistently growing our storage product line, bringing real-time complete package of inferencing capability directly into the intelligent edge.

These new products accelerate our strategic focus on enterprise customers as the company expanded towards scaling agentic model, enterprise data governance and high-throughput inferencing workload. We recently announced several major strategic partnerships combining Super Micro's DCBBS with the world-leading technology companies, including Cisco, NetApp, Nutanix and others. With additionally Tier 1 partnership coming soon, we are embedding Super Micro DCBBS footprint deeply into the world's most trusted enterprise. I know some investors and market experts have recently raised question and concern about AI capital expenditure efficiency and return on investment. Let me be clear. Super Micro is uniquely positioned to thrive in this environment.

For over 30 years, we have been focusing on the server and storage industry right here in the United States longer than almost all of our competitors, building a mature, well-established domestic manufacturing and engineering footprint that our competitors simply hard to match. This deep U.S. heritage and combined with our unique DCBBS hardware, software and service total solution directly solve the ROI challenge for our customers by optimizing TTD, time to delivery; TTO, time to online; and computing uptime and energy efficiency. Whether our customers are building massive Tier 1 AI factory or deploying enterprise agentic AI workload, Super Micro ensures their capital investment convert into revenue faster and more cost efficiently than anyone else, we believe.

We are achieving strong internal discipline through continuous operational optimization, factory automation and scale development through technology, process refinement and training. We have successfully reduced our inventory and production turnaround time from about 100 days to 74 days over the past 3 quarters. Looking ahead, our target is to further streamline our inventory and production cycle down to 50 days over the coming quarters. It's not easy, but we believe we will achieve it. This ongoing efficiency optimization will continue to strengthen Super Micro's cash flow, working capital cycle and drive higher bottom line profitability. Doesn't matter how competitive the market gets. More customers will adopt Super Micro DCBBS.

That include data center end-to-end hardware management software and end-to-end data center services. Now let's turn to our outlook for fiscal year 2027. While our overall demand and our growth momentum remained very strong across every front, we must be -- recognize that key component shortage continue to impact delivery time line across the IT industry, even GPU. A new customer program and strategic ecosystem partnership are ramping strongly, but we want to remain prudent about some key components' availability and volatile pricing based on what we see today. We anticipate our fiscal 2027 revenue target will be in the range of $72 billion to $82 billion. That is about 12% higher than the target we set 1 quarter ago.

Before I turn the call over, I want to highlight a few important leadership update. First, we are pleased to welcome a long-time industry technology leader, Shesha Krishnapura, to our Board of Directors, bringing deep data center operational experience and expertise to support our scaling. Second, my sincere thanks to David Weigand for his 6 years of CFO leadership during our period of massive growth. We look forward to his ongoing support and contribution in optimizing our operation to a much bigger scale. Finally, I'm delighted to introduce Mark Long, our new CFO, whose dedicated, I guess, 30, 40 years of tech and financial leadership will be a strong help for our next phase of growth.

Now I will change over the call to Mark.

Mark Long: Thank you, Charles, and good afternoon, everyone. This is my first call with you, so let me take 2 minutes before we get to the numbers. I've spent much of my career in technology infrastructure finance, including as Chief Financial Officer of a public company in this industry. What brought me to Super Micro is that the hardest part is already built, deep engineering advantage, a real lead in liquid cooling and rack-scale integration and a key position in the largest infrastructure build-out of our careers. What the company needs now is financial capability that matches its engineering and operating capability.

I'm excited to join Super Micro at this pivotal time and look forward to helping Charles and the team continue to deliver an expanding portfolio of innovative solutions to a growing global customer base, including some of the largest, most demanding customers who are shaping the future of the AI era. To do that will require continued financial discipline, transparency, deeper engagement with stakeholders, working capital management and capital structure optimization, which will be my areas of focus. Now to the quarter. Total revenue was $19.9 billion, up 298% year-over-year and 79% sequentially.

That is above our guidance range of $14.5 billion to $15.5 billion and above the preliminary range of $18.5 billion to $19.5 billion we provided on October 20. As Charles noted, approximately $2.3 billion represented deployments originally scheduled for earlier periods due to customer and data center readiness. Excluding that, underlying revenue was approximately $17.6 billion. AI solutions contributed approximately 71% of revenue compared with 59% in Q4. Based on our current backlog, we expect AI-related solutions to represent approximately 70% to 80% of revenue for fiscal 2027. Enterprise and channel revenue was $4.9 billion or 25% of revenue, up 229% year-over-year and down 12% sequentially.

OEM appliance and large data center revenue was $14.7 billion or 74%, up 321% year-over-year and 167% sequentially, driven by production ramps on several large AI data center design wins. The 5G telco and Edge segment, while still small in relative terms, grew significantly both year-over-year and sequentially. By geography, the United States represented 80% of revenue; Europe, 11%; and Asia, 6%; and the rest of the world, 3%. The United States grew 771% year-over-year and 103% sequential. While the U.

S. remains the largest market for large-scale AI data centers, we are seeing growing momentum in other regions as large customers expand globally, and governments and enterprises plan and fund significant AI data centers in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In the quarter, one large data center customer represented 44% of revenue compared with 28% for fiscal 2026 as a whole. In our 10-Q, you will also see that 2 customers accounted for 49% and 17% of accounts receivable at quarter end. I want to provide more context for this. Concentration at this level is a consequence of the scale at which AI infrastructure is now being built.

A single deployment today can exceed our total quarterly revenue from just 1 year ago. We expect concentration to stay elevated while these build-outs run and to moderate as our enterprise and sovereign businesses grow. What matters alongside the concentration is the quality of the exposure. So let me give you that. Deferred revenue increased by approximately $3.1 billion during the quarter, an overwhelming majority of which reflects customers paying in advance of delivery. Days sales outstanding improved from 59 days to 36 days. We recorded no material credit losses in the quarter. On large deployments, we frequently require deposits and often bill against delivery milestones.

We evaluate counter-party credit before committing manufacturing capacity and critical components, and we maintained a $1.8 billion receivables purchase facility that gives us flexibility in both cash timing and credit exposure. We have declined business in this market on terms we were not comfortable with, and in the current environment, I expect we will continue to make that choice. Non-GAAP gross margin was 12.8%. That is 200 to 240 basis points above our guidance range of 10.4% to 10.8% and 330 basis points above the first quarter of last year. On a GAAP basis, gross margin was 12.7%. It is also down 480 basis points from the 17.6% we reported in Q4.

And I want to take that apart because a single factor explanation would be misleading. The key factor impacting gross margin was the Q1 AI revenue mix, which increased from 59% in Q4 to 71% in Q1. The customer and product mix within our Q1 business was weighted toward large-scale AI deployments, which carry lower gross margins than the more diversified enterprise and channel business. Benefits from tariff relief and lower inventory reserves during the quarter were largely offset by certain lower-margin deferred revenues, which were recognized during the quarter. I want to be precise about 1 point because I know how the mix figures can be read. The sequential decline is not evidence that AI platform revenue lacks margin.

It reflects which customers took delivery in which order. The clearest way to see the underlying trend is to look at the last 2 quarters together, which neutralizes the deferral timing. Across Q4 and Q1 combined, revenue was approximately $31.1 billion and non-GAAP gross margin was approximately 14.5%. For the same 2 quarters a year earlier, revenue was approximately $10.8 billion, and gross margin was approximately 9.5%. On that normalized basis, revenue nearly tripled and gross margin improved by roughly 500 basis. We continue to demonstrate significant operating leverage. Revenue grew 298% year-over-year against an 89% increase in non-GAAP operating expenses. GAAP operating expenses were $477 million, up 67% year-over-year and 5% sequentially.

Non-GAAP operating expenses were $384 million, up 89% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. The sequential increases reflect higher headcount costs and research and development spending as we invest in multiple new platforms for AI data center and enterprise applications. Non-GAAP operating margin was 10.9% compared with 14.3% in Q4. Here, too, the 2-quarter view is more useful one. Across Q4 and Q1 combined, non-GAAP operating expenses were approximately $741 million or about 2.4% of revenue, and non-GAAP operating margin was approximately 12.1% compared with roughly 5.4% for the same 2 quarters a year earlier. We intend to keep investing in R&D, field service and our global footprint, and we expect operating expenses to keep growing well below the rate of revenue.

Other income and expense was a net expense of $34 million, consisting of $49 million of interest expense and other expense offset by $83 million of interest expense on our convertible notes and revolving credit facilities. The tax provision was $435 million on a GAAP basis and $455 million on a non-GAAP basis, with an effective tax rate of 21.4% on both basis. I would like to expand on some points made in the last earnings call regarding earnings per share because our capital structure now has a moving part that I do not think is well understood. We calculate earnings per share using the 2-class method, which reflects the mandatory convertible preferred stock we issued in Q4.

That instrument carries a fixed dividend of approximately $75 million per quarter and converts to common stock in June 2029. Between now and then, both the dividend and the allocation of earnings to that participating security produce earnings available to common shareholders this quarter by approximately $312 million in aggregate. GAAP diluted earnings per share were $1.75 against guidance of $0.89 to $0.98. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share were $1.81 against guidance of $1.01 to $1.10. GAAP basic earnings per share were $1.92. Now to working capital, which I think will help explain key elements of how we operate our business. Our cash conversion cycle improved from 149 days to 97 days, a 52-day improvement in a single quarter.

At our Q1 revenue run rate, that difference represents roughly $10 billion of working capital the business would otherwise have needed to fund. The cash flow statement shows this. We used $434 million of cash in operations on $19.9 billion of revenue. For all of fiscal 2026, we used $6.8 billion on $39.1 billion of revenue. Capital expenditure in the quarter was $47 million, so free cash flow was negative $481 million against negative $7 billion for fiscal 2026. Let me break down the 52 days, including both the positives and the areas for potential improvement. Days of inventory improved 45 days to 74. Days sales outstanding improved 23 days to 36, helped by faster collections and by customer prepayments.

Days payable outstanding moved against us from 29 days to 13, which consumed roughly $3 billion and reflects timing of payments to suppliers in a supply-constrained environment. The largest single driver was customer prepayment. Deferred revenue increased approximately $3.1 billion in the quarter. Accounts receivable grew $3.6 billion, and inventory grew $2.5 billion to support the revenue ahead of us, and prepayments funded most of that build. We expect the cash conversion cycle for the current quarter to be within the band of plus or minus 10% versus Q1, which enables us to appropriately manage our working capital while also executing against attractive market opportunities. We ended the quarter with $6.9 billion of cash and cash equivalents.

Bank borrowing and convertible notes totaled $8.6 billion for net debt of $1.7 billion compared with $1.2 billion at the end of Q4. Inventory was $15.1 billion, up from $12.9 billion, built to support the revenue we expect in coming quarters. We are in compliance with all covenants at quarter end. On capital structure more broadly, we are starting from a strong foundation. The $5.6 billion we raised in June was raised specifically to fund the working capital behind the orders we are now delivering.

As we identify high growth -- high quality growth opportunities, we will optimize our capital structure to support them, and we will do that in ways that fortify the balance sheet without taking on unnecessary costs. That means matching the duration and the form of our funding to the working capital and the assets it supports and being deliberate about when and whether we access markets. I will be transparent with you every quarter about dilution, maturities and available capacity. We ended the quarter with a record backlog, providing stronger visibility for the current quarter and the remainder of the fiscal year. Turning to guidance.

For the second quarter of fiscal 2027, we expect net sales of $19.5 billion to $21.5 billion and gross margin of 12% to 12.5%. We expect GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.59 to $1.83 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.66 to $1.90. That guidance assumes GAAP operating expenses of approximately $455 million, including approximately $102 million of stock-based compensation, which is excluded from non-GAAP.

We expect other income and expense, including interest expense, to result in a net expense of approximately $58 million, GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates of approximately 21% and GAAP diluted share count of approximately 753 million and non-GAAP diluted share count of approximately 769 million, preferred dividends of approximately $75 million and capital expenditure of $70 million to $80 million. For the full fiscal year, we are raising our revenue outlook to $72 billion to $82 billion from $65 billion to $72 billion. We expect full year gross margin of 11.8% to 12.2%. Let me connect that to the quarter we just reported.

Q1 included approximately $2.3 billion of catch-up from prior period deployments, so underlying revenue was approximately $17.6 billion. The full year range does not assume that catch-up repeats. It does assume continued sequential growth in underlying demand, and it reflects materially better visibility into customer deployment schedules than we had 90 days ago. Our business continues to strengthen and momentum is building for fiscal 2027, although we are gated by supply constraints and data center readiness, and we are focused on disciplined execution, creditworthy counterparties and expanding our higher-margin revenue streams. On margin, I want to be straightforward about what the full year range implies.

With Q1 at 12.8% and Q2 guided to 12% to 12.5%, the full year range implies gross margin in the second half below the first half. That is a mix effect. We expect AI solutions to move toward the upper end of the 70% to 80% range as the large deployments in our backlog ship and those carry lower gross margin than enterprise and channel verticals. Within each category, we expect margins to hold or improve. What governs the range is not demand, and it is not our ability to build. It is the pace at which customer facilities become ready to receive what we've already manufactured and the availability of key components.

The binding constraints on AI build-outs across this industry right now are land, power and data center shells. We have better visibility into that than we did, and we will update you as the year progresses. Let me close where I started. This was a quarter of strong growth with high-quality customers. Revenue nearly quadrupled year-over-year. Gross margin came in well above our guidance, and customer prepayments funded most of the working capital needed to deliver in. Behind those results is a broad and innovative portfolio from DCBBS rack-scale and liquid-cooled systems to enterprise storage, Edge and software that positions us for the most demanding workloads and the widest range of use case in the AI build-out.

My focus going forward is the one I described at the outset, financial discipline so that growth is profitable growth; transparency so that you can see how this business works from quarter to quarter, including the timing effects that moves our numbers; deeper engagement with all of our stakeholders; working capital management, building on the improvement in our cash conversion cycle this quarter and a capital structure optimized to support high-quality growth from a strong foundation. I'm looking forward to meeting many of you over the coming months. Michael, we are ready for questions.

Michael Staiger: Great. Jen, let's poll for questions.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs.

Katherine Murphy: First, I want to ask just about the raised revenue outlook. Understand that land, power and data center shells are the binding constraints here but wanted to understand in your full year outlook and then in your pipeline, what share of those projects do you have line of sight into the off-takers and the committed volume there. And then I have a follow-up question.

Charles Liang: Yes. I mean, as you know, the power and even GPU, some component shortage, right, but because our solution outperform the industry's solution, so especially with our DCBBS. DCBBS not just provide a data center hardware building block but software and service, help customer build the data center quicker and also keep their computing power, uptime much better. So indeed, we continue to gain more customers and gain market share. So we feel pretty optimistic for continued market share growth.

Katherine Murphy: And then as a follow-up, could you talk more about the customer prepayments in the quarter and how we should think about that continuing to support your working capital efficiency going forward? Is that something we can expect in the value that DCBBS and the market share gain strategy that you've talked about?

Charles Liang: Yes. As you know, I mean, now cash flow a little bit tight to a lot of companies. But at Super Micro, because we have a better total solution, again, our DCBBS attract a lot of customers. So basically, we see a good sign. Most of our customers are able to pay us on time, and we feel very solid to continue to grow our business. Mark, you may add something.

Mark Long: Yes, I think the advantage, as Charles pointed out, is really around the quality of the customer base, so very large creditworthy customers who pay very quickly. They provide very strong cash flow for us. But the broad customer base is providing more prepayments, and that discipline enables us to fund a lot more of this working capital. And I think you should expect that to continue. So we feel like we're in very good position. The company has done a lot since they raised capital in the summer and since the cash conversion cycle has improved. So working capital efficiency has gone up substantially.

Charles Liang: Yes. As we just shared, we improve our business in terms of cash flow in 2 areas. One is we improve inventory and production turnaround time from about 100 days to now 70 days, and we believe we will be able to continue to improve that production and inventory turnaround time. Second phase -- second point, as Mark just said, we're getting a higher-quality customer, and those customers pay on time or even pay a quick turnaround. So we are very solid in this area.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital.

Ananda Baruah: Congrats on the progress, and Mark, welcome. I have -- yes, 2 if I could. I guess, the first one, Mark, is just on the gross margin and the way to think about the dynamics that are layering in through the balance of the fiscal year. Correct me if I'm wrong here. I actually have to hit the midpoint of your guide while down in the second half of the year, sort of flat around 12% the next 3 quarters. So correct me if that's wrong. And then really, the question is you talked about AI mix up sort of being a factor in there.

What -- could you share a little bit about inside of the AI customer base, like what are the moving parts on the margins? I think Charles in the past has talked about improvement in AI margins sort of as in the go forward and just interested to know what the dynamics at play are, are there as you go through the rest of the fiscal year inside of the AI margins. And then I have a quick follow-up.

Charles Liang: Yes. As I just shared, in last 3 quarters or 4 quarters, our production time and also our production quality, [ ERA ] dramatically improved, and that make our turnaround time quicker and make the customer happier because of better TTD and better TTO help customer time to online. So customers appreciate that. Plus our DCBBS software and service, that help customer further. And better quality customer, we continue to gain more customers, especially including the enterprise agentic customers. So all those are positive impacting our business.

Mark Long: Yes. And I think just to kind of build on what Charles said, in terms of the guide for the year, what you're seeing is we have good line of sight, and now the business is stabilizing and kind of has this foundation in this 12% gross margin range with room as we continue to diversify our customer base and our product sets to expand those gross margins further. So the precise modeling, you're relatively close on your original question, but for us, the visibility is very strong. And as Charles pointed out, the gross margin across all of our customer categories, hasn't improved. That's really the important thing.

And this is a function of what Charles was talking about in terms of our great engineering, our great product set and the execution of the team. So we feel like we're in a very good position at this scale, and we see enormous opportunities going forward.

Charles Liang: Yes, like our DCBBS, we provide not just data center building product solution hardware components but also software, also help customer kind of keep uptime. So all those almost become one of our business moats. So customers like our product. More and more customers like our solution.

Ananda Baruah: That's really great context, guys. And the quick follow-up is what's the reasonable expectation for opportunity with the CPU business, just with all the structural tailwinds as you go through the fiscal year here. And that's it for me.

Charles Liang: Yes. As you know, agentic AI is getting very popular. So we're getting lots of customers, including lots of our enterprise customers. They are buying our CPU-based solution, including our Intel CPU-based AMD, including NVIDIA Vera. Our NVIDIA Vera solution is ready and including Arm solution. So we see a much stronger CPU demand now and looking forward.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Cardoso with JPMorgan.

Joseph Cardoso: Mark looking forward to working with you. Maybe just for my first if I could, it sounds like in your prepared remarks, you're not including any of more catch-up or deferred deliveries in the guidance. But I guess maybe first question here is just can you just clarify if there are still deferred deliveries that are remaining and just not embedded in the outlook. And then the second portion of that question is more as we kind of strip that out of the numbers, you're still kind of implying a moderation in growth coming into the second half of the year versus the first half.

So maybe can you just walk us through the dynamics that are influencing that and if it has anything to do maybe with the concentration with your largest customer here may be fading going into the back half? And then I do have a follow-up.

Mark Long: Yes. I think the key point about deferred revenue historically kind of looking back was that there was this set of deliveries and deployments that have been delayed, and they have been carried over from prior quarters. In a typical quarter, you will have some revenue recognition based on deliveries and you may have 1 or 2 deployments that are delayed. But those were -- that was a larger-than-typical amount of revenue that had been deferred. And when that was released, that caused a number of things. Revenue went up. And as we mentioned, that was margin dilutive on an overall basis.

But going forward, we don't expect the same types and the same magnitude of delayed deployments through the deferred revenue. And most of the deferred revenue is either customer prepayments or we have our service and software revenue that we typically defer over a number of periods.

Charles Liang: Yes. The good thing is since we introduced DCBBS, some of our customers and some of our -- even our internal people are little bit confused. So that's why they kind of have a certain argument about when to recognize. But now our DCBBS is a much mature business. So not just our internal people are now familiar with our DCBBS and customers understand which services they buy, which services they did not buy, so we should not cover that. So since it's getting much clearer, much mature, so that will help our deferred revenue program.

Mark Long: Yes. And the second question regarding guidance implying moderation in growth in the second half, what you're really hearing is just our sort of range of expectations based on the supply constraints and trying to gauge where the data center readiness for large deployments will land us. But as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, demand remains extremely strong and especially the interest in the DCBBS product portfolio.

Joseph Cardoso: Got it. Very clear. And then maybe as my second one, just dovetailing off of that a little bit, and maybe this is a two-parter as well. But you're talking about maybe shortages here going into -- or kind of the supply tightness, I guess, in terms of the total ecosystem. Can you maybe just touch on what's the most binding constraint as you think about the 2Q and second half outlook? Is it largely associated with the GPUs? Or is it other elements on the component side? And then the second question is just more around, obviously, within this backdrop of shortages, pricing has obviously been a strong element in terms of pass-through.

Any way you can kind of help us think through, as we think about your '27 outlook, how much of the growth is being driven by units as opposed to cost pass-through?

Charles Liang: Yes, very good question. I mean the reason why we have a conservative number for annual revenue, $72 billion to $82 billion, because we are concerning about some key components shortage and also macro economy. So if the component shortage won't be a big issue and if the macroeconomy is healthy then, for sure, our second half will be much bigger than our first half. So we hope so, and that's why we are very optimistic to see our second half have a much better performance than the first half. And if that's the case, $72 billion to $82 billion becomes very, very conservative.

Mark Long: Yes. And I think your point about the growth in ASPs really driven by the cost of key components that has been going up sometimes more than quarterly, our outlook does not -- for the second half does not encompass significant growth in ASPs. So again, we have a relatively conservative approach there. And we're really looking at the details of customer deployments, what they need, which product sets, what our production capacity is and kind of how to manage into that. And as Charles pointed out, our demand far outstrips the availability of key components.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America.

Ruplu Bhattacharya: Mark, congrats on the role, and I look forward to working with you. Maybe I'll ask you my first question. As you look out over the next 12 months, do you think Super Micro has enough cash and cash flow to self-fund the investments that are needed to support the strong growth that you're seeing? What would cause you to raise more capital? And do you have a preference for debt versus equity? And I have a follow-up.

Charles Liang: Very good question. As you know, by end of the last quarter, our cash is $6 billion. We never have so much cash in the bank. So indeed, the cash flow at this moment, we don't worry. Even second half continue to grow strongly if the macroeconomy is healthy. Our cash flow is in much strong position than before ever.

Mark Long: Right. Yes, as Charles pointed out, I mean starting with $6.9 billion of cash puts us in a very good position. As we mentioned, our working capital efficiency has gone up. Our ability to fund our working capital needs through our focus on high-quality customers and some customer prepayments, that puts us in a great position so that we can optimize our capital structure. We can think about trade-offs. If we have very attractive opportunities that require incremental funding, we have our $1.8 billion working capital facility, and we have the opportunity to access other markets. As you point out, both the credit and equity markets, at this point, we don't have any plans to consider equity raises.

And as far as the debt markets, I think we would look at kind of what is available and how it would best position the company for continued success and provide us with the right leverage structure.

Operator: Due to time constraints, we'll be taking one final question. This question comes from the line of George Notter with Wolfe Research.

Brenden Rogers: It's Brenden Rogers on for George. I guess just a question on what's changed in your conversations with customers in the last 90 days in order to get this better visibility. Like is this a feature of today's market, like customers are extending the forecast time lines that they're giving you? Or is this sort of more of a shift in how you're managing the business?

Charles Liang: Yes. As we mentioned, we have a strong back order, and so we have a choice to select healthy customers and customer order quality. Customer quality is very important to us. So we have a chance to -- selective from some point of view.

Mark Long: Yes. And I think as Charles pointed out, we are getting better visibility from a number of our customers, some very large, some moderately large, and we're getting visibility across geographies. So...

Charles Liang: And enterprise.

Mark Long: Yes. And the growth of the enterprise business is another factor that will provide enhanced visibility and stability to our overall revenue stream.

Operator: We have reached the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

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