Astera Labs, Inc. Common Stock Price & Performance (ALAB)

Thank you, J. L. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the Acera Labs fourth quarter twenty twenty four earnings conference call. Joining us today on the call 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 the periodic reports and filings we file from time to time with the SEC including the risks, set forth in the final prospectus relating to our IPO and our upcoming filing on Form 10 ks. 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 statement.

In light of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, the results, events, or circumstances reflected in forward looking statements to 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 to conform to these as a result of new information future events or changes in our expectations, 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 or superior to financial results prepared in accordance with U. S. GAAP.

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 accessed through the Investor Relations portion of our website and will also be included in our filing with the SEC, which will also be accessible through the Investor Relations portion of our website. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Jitendra Mann, CEO of Astera. Jitendra?

Thank you, Leslie. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining our fourth quarter conference call for fiscal year twenty twenty four. Today, I'll provide an overview of our Q4 and full year 2024 results followed by a discussion around the key secular trends and the company specific drivers that will help Astra Labs deliver above industry growth in 2025 and beyond.

I will then turn the call over to Sanjay to discuss our medium and long term growth in more detail Finally, Mike will provide details of our Q4 twenty twenty four financial results in addition to our financial guidance for Q1 of twenty twenty five.

Etro Labs delivered strong Q4 results and second sixth consecutive record And Torus Ethernet Smart Cable module product families. Within these product families, we saw additional diversification driven by strong demand for both AI scale up and scale out connectivity. [indiscernible] with both product shipping in preproduction volumes during the first quarter to support our customers' qualifications across multiple platforms for a variety of use cases. Looking at the full year, our strong Q4 finish culminated in which saw full year sales increase by 242% year over year to $396,000,000 The value of our expanding product portfolio across both hardware and software was reflected in our robust fiscal twenty twenty four non GAAP gross margin of 76.6%. Over the past twelve months, we have aggressively broadened our technology capabilities by investing in our R and D organization to solve next generation connectivity infrastructure challenges. We successfully increased our headcount in 2024 by nearly 80% to four forty full time employees, In Q4, we also closed a small but strategic acquisition that included a talented group of architects and engineers to help accelerate our product development strengthen our foundational IP capability, and provide holistic connectivity solutions for our hyperscaler customers at a rack scale.

Our revenue growth in 2024 was largely driven by Ares products, along with a strong ramp of Toras in the first quarter. We expect 2025 to be a breakout year as we enter a new phase of growth driven by production revenue from all four of our product families, to support a diverse set of customers and platforms. In 2025, our Ares and Torus retimers are on track to continue their strong growth trajectory. Also, Esterra Labs is poised to be a key enabler of CXL proliferation over the next several years the volume ramp of our LEO family expected to start in second half of twenty twenty five. Finally, our Scorpio SmartFabric switches will begin ramping this year with new and broadening engagements for scale up with our X Series, and scale out with our PCD switches. In time, we expect Scorpio fabric switches to become our largest product line given the size and growth of the market opportunity for AI fabrics. Across our industry, hyperscalers are pushing the boundaries of scale up compute to support large language models that continue to grow in capacity and complexity. Recent algorithmic improvements have shown the potential to deliver AI applications with better return on investment for AI infrastructure providers.

These innovations enable increased adoption and broader use cases for AI across the industry. The secular trends underlying our business are projected to be robust in 2020 Hypercatters are deploying internal ASIC based RackScale AI servers that use end to end scale up networks to deliver larger higher performance and more efficient clusters. The scale up networks require every accelerator to connect with every other accelerator, with fully non blocking, high throughput and low latency data pipes, This drives the need for more and faster interconnects. And the homogeneity of such a system allows for many optimizations and innovations. For PCIe based scale up clusters, our innovative Scorpio X Series, and Aries Retimer family are perfectly suited to provide a custom built interconnect solution. In addition to PCIe based scale up opportunities, we are excited about the next potentially broader opportunity with Ultra Accelerator Link or UA Link This is an impactful initiative by the AI industry to develop an open scale up interconnect fabric for the entire market. Early in 2025, significant progress has been made advancing the development of U. L. Link to provide the industry with a high speed Calab interconnect for next generation AI clusters. The ULE consortium recently expanded its Board of Directors to include several more technology leaders, including Alibaba Cloud and Apple.

Given our intimate involvement within this open standard, we are seeing overall engagement accelerate Prestara Labs' next generation high speed connectivity solutions. In summary, we anticipate the the than underlying AI accelerator shipments. We look to take full advantage of these robust trends by broadening our existing product portfolio with differentiated hardware and software solutions across multiple protocols and interconnect media. We are accelerating our pace and level of development driven by our customers to deliver new products that address the rapidly growing market opportunity ahead of us. With that, let me turn the call over to our President and COO, Sanjay Gajendra, to discuss our growth strategy in more detail. Thanks, Jithendroop, and good afternoon, everyone. 2024 was a significant year for Astera Labs as we diversified our business across multiple vectors, We launched our Scorpio fabric switches generated revenue from all four of our product lines and transitioned into high volume production for ADI's and Taurus smart cable modules. We also started ramping multiple new AI platforms Based on internally developed AI accelerators, at multiple customers to go along with continued momentum with third party GPU based AI platforms. This expansion to internal accelerator based platforms took off in the third quarter and helped us establish a new revenue baseline for our business with continued growth in the fourth quarter.

As we look into 2025, we see strong secular trends across the industry supported by higher CapEx spent by our customers broadening deployment of AI infrastructure driven by more efficient AI models and company specific catalyst that should drive above market growth rates for Astera Labs. Specifically for 2025, we expect three key business drivers. One, is the continued deployment of internally developed AI accelerator platforms that incorporate multiple Astera Labs product families including Ares, Taurus and Scorpio. As a result, we'll continue to benefit from increased dollar content per accelerator in these next generation AI infrastructure systems. Based on known design wins, backlog and forecast from multiple customers, we see strong continued growth of our ADI's PCIe Gen five products in 2025. As AI accelerator cluster sizes scale within the rack, and rack to rack we see meaningful opportunities to drive reach extension with our Aries retimer solutions in both chip on board and smart cable module formats. Our tallest product family has demonstrated strong growth over the past several quarters. Paving the way for solid revenue contributions in twenty twenty five. We continue to see good demand for total 400 gig Ethernet solutions utilizing our smart cable modules [indiscernible] for AI and general purpose compute infrastructure applications.

Looking ahead, we view the transition to 800 gig Ethernet at the late twenty twenty five event for a broader market in 2026. Additionally, design activity for Scorpio X Series products across next generation scale up architectures in AI accelerator platforms is also showing exciting momentum as we continue to broaden our customer engagements. The Scorpio X Series is built upon a software defined [indiscernible] and supports a variety of platform specific customizations which enables valuable flexibility for our customers. We are pleased to report that we have received The first preproduction orders for our Scorpio X Series product family. The second driver for our 2025 business is the expected production ramp of custom AI racks based on industry leading third party GPUs. We are shipping preproduction quantities to support qualification of designs utilizing our Scorpio P Series and 80s PCIe Gen six solutions to maximize GPU throughput while leveraging our customers' own internal networking hardware and software capabilities. These programs are driving higher dollar content opportunities for Astera Labs on a pull rack and pull accelerator basis, and we expect volume deployments to begin in the second half of this year. At the DesignCon twenty twenty five trade show, we demonstrated the better together combination of [indiscernible] PCIe retimer and 100 gig per lane Ethernet retimer solutions utilizing our Cosmo software suite.

This provides deeper levels of telemetry to pinpoint connectivity issues in complex topologies while enabling tighter integration of Cosmos APIs into our customers' operating stacks, We also showcased the first public demonstration of end to end interoperability between Scorpio fabric switches 83 timers and Microns PCIe Gen six SSDs. This demonstration highlighted the maturity of our PCIe Gen six solutions growing PCIe Gen six ecosystem and our performance leadership by doubling the maximum storage throughput possible today and setting a new industry benchmark. The third driver for our 2025 business is general compute in the data center. We expect revenue growth from general compute based platform opportunities featuring new CPUs, new network cards and SSDs with our 80s PCIe ED timers Taurus Ethernet SEM and the LEO CXL product families, Though general compute is a smaller portion of our business compared to AI servers, we benefit from the diversity with multiple layers of growth. Overall, we're excited by the many opportunities and secular trends in front of us to drive 2025 revenues. We're also encouraged by our customers and partners increasing their trust in us and opening new opportunities for new product lines to support their platform roadmaps. As a result, we'll continue to aggressively invest in R and D to further expand our product and technology portfolio as we work to increase our total addressable market.

We'll build upon our semiconductor software and hardware capabilities to address comprehensive connectivity solutions at a rack scale to ensure robust performance maximum system utilization and capital efficiency. As we look to 2026 and beyond, our playbook remains the same. [indiscernible] stay closely aligned with our customers and partners. Two, innovate exponentially in everything we do and three, continue to be laser focused on product and technology execution. Our long term growth strategy is to aggressively attack the large and growing high speed connectivity market. We estimate or portfolio of hardware and software solutions across retimers, controllers, and fabric switches will address a $12,000,000,000 market by 2028, Significant portions of this market opportunity such as AI fabric solutions for back end scale up applications are greenfield in nature. With a diverse and broad set of technology capabilities, we are partnering with key AI ecosystem players to help solve the increasingly difficult system level intricate intricate connect challenges of tomorrow. By helping to eliminate data networking and memory connectivity bottlenecks, our value proposition expands and will drive our dollar content opportunity higher. In conclusion, we are motivated by the meaningful opportunity that lies before us and will continue to passionately support our customers, by strengthening our technology capabilities and investing in the future, Before I turn the call over to our CFO, Mike Tate to discuss Q4 financial results and our Q1 outlook, I want to take a quick moment to thank our customers partners and most importantly to our team and families for a great 2024.

With that, Mike, Thanks Sanjay.

And thanks to everyone for joining the call. This overview of our Q4 financial results and Q1 twenty twenty five guidance will be on a non GAAP basis The primary difference in Astera Labs non GAAP metrics is stock based compensation 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 GAAP to non GAAP financial measures presented on this call. For Q4 twenty twenty four, Asteria Labs delivered record quarterly revenue of $141,100,000 which was up 25% versus the previous quarter and 179% higher than the revenue in Q4 of twenty twenty three. During the quarter, we enjoyed strong revenue growth Both our Ares and Taurus smart cable module products supporting both scale up and scale out PCIe and Ethernet connectivity for AI rack level configurations For LEO CXL and Scorpio Smart Fabric Switches, we shipped preproduction volumes as our customers work to qualify their products for production deployments later in 2025. Q4 non GAAP gross margins was 74.1%, was down from the September levels due to a product mix shift towards hardware based solutions with both our Ares and Taurus, smart cable modules.

Non GAAP operating expenses for Q4 were $56,200,000 up from $51,300,000 in the previous quarter as we continue to scale our R and D organization to expand and broaden our long term market opportunity As previously mentioned on this call, we closed a small acquisitions toward the latter half of the quarter which also contributed slightly higher spending during the period. Within Q4, non GAAP operating expenses R and D expense was $37,800,000 sales and marketing expense was $8,100,000 and general and administrative expenses was 100 and I'm sorry $10,400,000 Non GAAP operating margin for Q4 was 34.3% up from 32.4% in Q3 which demonstrated strong operating leverage as revenue growth outpaced increased operating expenses. Interest income in Q4 was $10,600,000 On a non GAAP basis, given our cumulative history of non GAAP profitability, starting in Q4 we will no longer be accounting for a full valuation allowance on our deferred tax assets As a result, in the fourth quarter, we realized an income tax benefit for this change resulting in a Q4 tax benefit of $7,600,000 and an income tax benefit rate of 13%. Which compares to our previous guidance of an income tax expense rate of 10% Non GAAP fully diluted share count for Q4 was $177,600,000 shares And our non GAAP diluted earnings per share for the quarter was $0.37 Excluding the impact of the Q4 tax benefit just noted, and based on a 10% non GAAP income tax rate during the quarter, as previously guided, non GAAP EPS would have been Cash flow from operating activities for Q4 was 39.7 we ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $914,000,000 Now turning to our guidance for Q1 of fiscal twenty twenty five.

We expect Q1 revenues to increase to within a range of $151,000,000 and $155,000,000 up roughly 7% to 10% For Q1, we expect continued growth from our ARIES product family across multiple over a broad range of AI platforms. We look for our tours SCM revenue for 400 gig applications to all provide strong contribution to the top line in Q1. Our LEO CXL controller family will continue shipping in preproduction quantities to support ongoing qualification ahead of volume ramp in the second half of twenty twenty five. Finally, we expect our Scorpio product revenue to grow sequentially in Q1 driven by growing preproduction volumes of designs for rack scale systems We continue to expect Scorpio revenue to comprise at least 10% of our total revenue for 2025, with acceleration exiting the year. We expect non GAAP gross margins to be approximately 74% as the mix between our silicon and hardware modules remain consistent with Q4 We expect first quarter non GAAP operating expenses to be in a range of approximately 66,000,000 to $67,000,000 Operating expenses will grow in Q1 is largely driven by three factors: one, continued momentum in expanding our R and D resource pool across headcount and intellectual property, two, seasonal labor expense step ups associated with annual performance merit increases and payroll tax resets and three, a full quarter contribution of the strategic acquisition we executed in the latter part of Q4.

We continue to be committed to driving operating leverage over the long term via strong revenue growth while reinvesting into our business to support the new market opportunities associated with next generation AI and cloud infrastructure projects. Interest income is expected to be approximately $10,000,000 Our non GAAP tax rate should be approximately 10% and our non GAAP fully diluted share count is expected to be approximately 180 shares Adding this all up, we are expecting non GAAP fully diluted earnings per share in a range of approximately $0.28 to $0.29 This concludes our prepared remarks. And once again, we appreciate everyone joining the call. And now we will open the line for questions. Operator? Thank you. Your first question comes from the line of Harlan Sur of JPMorgan.

Your line is open. Good afternoon and congratulations on the strong results and execution. The one big inflection in accelerated compute and AI as you mentioned is the ramp of numerous AI ASIC XPU programs, right? You've got CPU at Google, Tranium at Amazon, MTIA at Meta, also multiple new programs in the not too distant future. Looks like these custom AI program ramps are growing actually faster than the overall merchant GP [indiscernible] [indiscernible] The question is what percentage of your business last year came from merchant GPU AI systems? Basic based systems and where do you expect that mix to be say exiting this year? I mean ASIC programs seem on a faster growth trajectory. You have a very, very strong attach here across all your products as you guys mentioned. I'm just wondering if the team agrees with me on this view. Yes, we're very excited about the addition of these internal AI accelerator programs. Also in particular, those programs to the extent you're doing the scale up connectivity, unit volume steps up to a meaningful way compared to the merge GPU designs that we see right now. As we look into 2024, the first half of the year was predominantly merchant GPUs as that was the first to really adopt our product lines.

And then in Q3, that's the first quarter it inflected up with the internal AI accelerators, especially you see that with our Taurus and our Aries SEM business inflecting up. Q3 was a partial quarter and then Q4 was a full quarter. So it really set up a nice baseline of revenues. Now if you look into 2025, we see both contributing growth The first half of the year will be more predominantly the AI internal AI accelerator programs. But we get it in the back half of the year. The transition on the merchant GPUs will also be very strong for us This is where you'll see the custom rack configurations start to deploy and that's where we see a big dollar increase in our content per GPU with Scorpio starting to ramp. I appreciate that.

And on the balance sheet, inventories were up almost 80% sequentially in the December. That's an all time high for the team. I think it's up 60% versus the average inventory level over the past four quarters. Is the significant step up reflective of a strong multi quarter shipment profile across the overall portfolio? Or maybe reflective of a step up in more of your board solutions or is it kind of a combination of both? Well, if you remember in Q3, our revenues were very strong. We were up 47% sequentially. A lot of that strength developed during the quarter. So we drew down our inventories pretty significantly in Q3. Now in Q4, we had time to build back to a more normalized level. So this level of inventory is actually where we feel most comfortable. We always want to be in a position to support upsides from our customers and because most of our programs are sole sourced. But this level reflects the growth in our business now.

Great. Thank you.

Your next question from the line of sorry, Blaine Curt of Jefferies. Your line is open. Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I had two. I was just kind of curious, you mentioned the strength in Torrance. I didn't know if you're going tell us in as to how maybe big that was in December And then Mike, I wanted to ask on gross margin. I know it's a mix of hardware and you're seeing strength from at least your basic customer there with multiple products. I'm just kind of curious as you think about '25 as Scorpio ramps, how that makes shifts and what the impacts are of the shape of gross margin for this year? Yes. So for Q4, you see the margins, they tick down and we did highlight the Taurus and Ares, which are in the module form factors grew as a percentage of our total revenues. And the upside in the quarter was in particular from Taurus as well. So thus, the margin going down to 74.1%, which is reasonably close to what we had expected. Now as you go into 2025, we still could see good contribution from Taurus and the Ares SCM modules.

But as we make it through the year, the Ares board unchip as well as Leo and Scorpio are are a positive for us as well. So we think Q1 and Q2, we should have a consistent margin profile around 74% and as we've highlighted, margins will be trending down closer to the longer term model 70%. But it all depends on the mix of our hardware versus silicon.

Thanks.

And then I was just kind of curious, if you could now that you're a quarter removed from launching Scorpio, just kind of comment on the design momentum you've had in terms the number of engagements. And I'm just kind of curious in terms of from a competitive landscape wise, for scale up outside of EmbiLink, what else is out there that you're seeing that you're competing against with those products?

Evelyn, this is Sanjay here. Let me help answer that. So for us, as you know, Scorpio has got two series PCDs for PCIe and head node use case, which tends to be pretty broad. And then X Series is for the GPU clustering on the back end side.

So overall, since we launched, we continue to pick up multiple design opportunities at this point. Both for PCDs as well as for XCDs. X Series tends to be a more sort of a longer design in and qualification just because it's going into into the back end GPU side, but the front end PC series is what we expect to start contributing meaningful revenue starting second half of this year. As the production volumes take off. We have been shipping preproduction for PCBs already and then for X Series, we started receiving our first preproduction orders. So to that standpoint, what I want to share is that the momentum on Scorpio has been definitely more than what we expected. Largely driven by the feature set that we have implemented. Where Scorpio is the first set of fabric devices for PCIe and back end connectivity that's been developed ground up for AI use cases. So to that standpoint, the customers see the value in the features we have and the performance that we're delivering. Blayne, this is Jeetendra.

Your question on what else is out there, of course, clearly NVLink is the one that is most commonly deployed, most widely deployed within the NVIDIA ecosystem.

And we don't play there. Other than that, there is of course the PCIe based scale up network that Sandeep just talked about. And the other alternative is Ethernet based scale up network.

And the difference between the two is really Ethernet is a very commonly used standard. But was not designed for scale up. So the latencies are quite high and you don't quite get the performance of Ethernet. Which is why we see many of our customers gravitate towards PCIe based systems, which are inherently better suited for this application. Now what we see happening in the future is [indiscernible] which is a developing standard that we are very excited about. And with the ULink, you get the benefit of both Ethernet speeds as well as the lower latency and the memory based IO of the PJ like protocols. Now over time, we do expect Scorpio to become our largest product line. Just because the market for scale up interconnect is so large. Very excited about what's coming in this space.

Thanks guys. Your next question comes from the line of Joe Moore of Morgan Stanley.

Great. Thank you. I know there's a lot of attention on the DeepSeq innovations that we saw a couple of weeks ago. Can you talk about what you've seen, how you would position that with regards to other innovations that we've seen Do you see it as deflationary to the long term opportunity in AI? Just would love to get your perspective on this.

Julien, I'll just detail it again. So let me start on that. First of all, you're right, there is a lot of discussion, lot of articles that have been written about deepseeds. So I'm not sure exactly what else we will be able to add.

But what I do want to point out is what matters most is what our customers, the hyperscalers think about Deepsea. And in the face of that announcement, they have all gone and increased the CapEx [indiscernible] So that really shows that the hyperscalers believe in the future of AI. And the continued demand for GPUs and accelerators is likely to continue.

And I can kind of give you my perspective on why that is. If you break it down into two, first, if you look at inference, for inference, DeepSeq has shown that algorithmic improvements will drive cost of inference lower. And we have seen time over again when the cost goes down, the adoption goes up. It happened with PCs, it happened with phones, it happened even with servers when virtualization kicked in and and we do think that AI will follow similar trajectory, so it gets more adoption And then if you look at training, just consumers like you and I, we are all looking for better results from these models.

And by embracing some of the innovations that the DeepSeq team has put forward, the quality of results from these models will go up and that again is beneficial for the overall AI ecosystem. So our focus has always been on enabling AI infrastructure with both the third party GPUs as well as ASIC platforms. And to the extent that any of the dynamic exchange we stand to benefit from from the trends.

It's very helpful. Thank you. And then for my follow-up, you talked about LEO ramp in the second half of the year. I know you're seeing quite a bit of interest in kind of memory bandwidth boosting kind of capabilities there. Can you help us size how important that could be in the second half?

Yes. So we've been working with our customers as is next generation CPUs that support CXL come to market. These are going to initially be very high memory data intensive. That applications, high performance compute type applications. So we'll see those start to deploy in the back half of the year. Ultimately, longer term, we do expect the CXL technology to be very beneficial for more mainstream general compute. So we hope to see that play out in 2026 and 2027. To add to that, Joe, yes, to add to what Mike said just to give you a little bit broader picture too, I think there are at this point, based on the fact that we have been working closely with the hyper scalers and the CPU vendors for quite some time now. It's become pretty clear that there are three or four sort of applications that are driving the ROI or or the use cases for CXL. So at this point, we understand that the the first one is getting deployed in the second half of this year and we do expect additional use cases and the associated opportunities to come along probably in 2026 and beyond.

Your next question comes from the line of Tore Svanberg of Stifel. Your line is open.

Yes. Thank you and congrats on the strong results. I had a question on Scorpio.

Think you said you still expect it to be more than 10% of revenues in calendar twenty five. Obviously, that number is now higher. Is that going to be predominantly the piece Series or you're going to get some contribution already from X Series in calendar twenty five?

We expect contribution for both The P Series will be first to launch and then the X Series, we do contribution in the latter part of the year? Great. And as a follow-up, on the Taurus, could you just talk a little bit about the revenue profile there? How diversified is it by customer and use case?

And how do you think about this that business first leverages second half? Because obviously, if it is more diverse in nature, then obviously, maybe second will be even greater than first half. But yes, just some profile of that revenue base right now.

Yes. So we're shipping both 200 gig and 400 gig 400 gig is what really launched here in Q3 and Q4. And we have multiple designs across different types of configurations and we also support different cable providers and different form Astera. The 400 gig opportunity is still relatively limited opportunity set out there. So we've been focusing primarily on our lead lead customer. This shift has continued to provide good strong growth for both in 2025 driven by both AI and general in '25. And then in a lot of part of the year, then we see the markets start to transition to 800 gig Great. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Tom O'Malley of Barclays.

Line is open.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. My first was in prepared remarks, you mentioned that over time Scorpio would become your biggest product line. I don't think you've mentioned that before. Perhaps you could talk about the timeframe that you're thinking about that product line taking over? Is there something that we should be seeing potentially as early as twenty twenty six? And is that a function of Scorpio growing faster than you had originally thought or perhaps Aries coming down to some extent just understanding why you made that comment in the preamble?

Yes. So I think to add some color to that, again, the ASP profile of a retimer class device and a switch device can to be very different, meaning on the switch side, we do get a significantly higher ASP. And if you look at at least for the customized AI racks that are being deployed, we are essentially adding a Scorpio socket to go along with the retimer socket and given that attach rate configuration, what we also see is that the dollar content per GPU will go up But in general, the switch is a much bigger TAM out there.

And then we get to play both in the front end with the PCBs and the back end. Back end tends to be obviously a lot more fertile in many ways. Because you have many GPUs talking to each other.

And we benefit from having a high ASP device like the Exede switches and them being deployed in a scale that's much more significant compared to any other products that we have released so far. It does not mean that the timers or CXO controllers are going to go away. Simply means that the the TAM that we're able to address with SCORPIO tends to be larger. And given the market momentum and opportunities that we're seeing, including some of the roadmap products we're developing, we feel confident that going forward that will continue to evolve and become our flagship product both from a technology and revenue standpoint.

Super helpful. And then my follow-up was just I think it was Mike's commentary on one of the first questions here on the call.

You talked about kind of the year 2025 on the Ares side, talking about how in the first half of the year, you would see more internal AI efforts followed by the second half of the year being more merchant GPU. That comment was a bit surprising to me given we're going through a big product transition now at the large customer of yours. So is there any change in the way that you see the ramp of 2025 versus where you did before? I would have anticipated maybe the merchant GPU being a bit stronger earlier in the year. Just any reason behind those comments that caught me a little off guard? [indiscernible] first of all, the merchant GPU drives both Scorpio and Ares. So, big incremental piece of the merchant GPUs is the Scorpio content. Which is old new for us.

The designs that we have are complex in nature. They're all new. So to get them productize and ramp, we're looking at that to start off in in the back half of the year. Right now in the first half of the year is preproduction. These are all for custom rack configuration. So the customization adds a little bit of lead time to the volume ramps.

Your next question comes from the line of Ross Seymore of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for asking. A couple of questions. First one is a little bit higher level and it's on diversification. You guys talked from a product diversification point of view with 10% of your revenues going forward. But there's also an admittedly concentrated batch of hyperscalers, there's also the customer concentration. So whether it be on the customer side or the product side or both, any way you can give us a little bit of framework of how 2024 ended and how you think 2025 will differ from a diversification lens?

Yes. So overall, 2024, in fact, 2025 or so, we are shipping to all the hyperscale across multiple different product sets that we have.

There should not be any doubt or question about that. But having said that, there are some nuances that are important to keep in mind when you're dealing with the data center market. The first thing, like we always say, customer concentration is an occupational hazard in the data center market. Just because there are only handful of hyperscalers. The second thing to keep in mind is that the hyperscalers differ in terms of their maturity when it comes to internal accelerator chip development. Some are more advanced than the others. For us, when we are designing and counting revenue from internal accelerator program. Obviously, there will be a difference between the hyperscalers where we get to play both on the merchant as well as internal accelerator programs compared to hyperscalers where we only have the merchant silicon opportunity. So there is that nuance. The other one that is also true is that the appetite for new technology deployment differs from hyperscaler to hyperscaler. So there will be some hyperscalers that are pretty aggressive in terms of deploying new technology. Others take some time. So you can expect that in a given window of time, there will be situation where our revenue would be coming more from a given hyperscaler versus the other.

It does not mean that the second hyperscaler is not a potential customer for us. It simply means that they take more time to deploy something just given their own workloads and and other things that they're tracking. But overall, our goal is make sure that the revenue contribution we get reflects the share that each hyperscaler has, meaning if a given hyperscaler has got a certain percentage of the market, in terms of cloud services, then we expect that we are similar numbers in our share.

That's very helpful. Thank you for that. Mike, one for you. You mentioned earlier about the gross margin, why it was down a little bit below your guide in the fourth quarter, stays flat in the first.

Sounds like you said stayed flat in the second as well.

Is that kind of hardwaremodule mix shift in the second half? It sounded like from what you said that it does go back away from the hardware side to a little bit more towards Yes. We do see growth in the hardware, but it should stay same similar level as rest of the business. So it's not growing as a a percentage of revenue in the first half of the year?

Your next question comes from the line Quinn Bolton of Needham.

Your line is open.

Hey guys, I wanted to come back to Gerry's question on deep Seek. And obviously, one of the benefits is greater deployment of of AI models, which probably means a shift towards inferencing. Do you guys see on the inferencing side the need for clusters that are as large as we've historically seen on the training side. And if we don't we see greater adoption of sort of more infancy clusters but of smaller size. Is that a positive or a negative for the connectivity TAM?

Let me take a crack at that. So I think first of all, at the high level, I can say that our our business is not strongly dependent on inferencing versus training. We tend to benefit from both of those. Now the point that you made is valid in that you don't need as large of a plus for insurances you need for cleaning. Having said that, if you look at the DCIC announcement or even for that Astera, other folks are announcing as well, this chain of thought models, which actually require far more compute than they have required historically. So over time, we do expect that the unit of compute will become a kind of a rack level AI server.

What typically used to be a two u or a four u server will now be at a rack level. And when you go to a rack level, you come up with these different connectivity challenges that we are very well positioned to address. As we are doing today with many of our different product lines. So all in all, as this unit of compute goes to rack level, we will see higher opportunity We already are participating in other form factor factors with our Scorpio P and Ares Detimer type products. And so overall, we don't see this as a headwind or a tailwind. We just stand to benefit from both of those. Got it. That was very helpful, Herman.

Second question just on the Scorpio P family. You mentioned that that growth really driven by the sort of custom versions of merchant GPU based platforms. Wondering you guys have engagements for ScorpioP on the ASIC platforms as well?

Thank you. [indiscernible] So we are for the for the customers that we engage right now, we do see opportunities both for PCD's and X Series as it relates to to ASIC platforms. PC is more for the head node connectivity to interconnect GPUs with CPU storage and networking. And X Series for the the back end to interconnect GPUs themselves.

Your next question Your next question comes from the line of Atif Melek of Citi.

Your line is open.

Hi.

Thank you for taking my questions.

My first question is on the co packaged optics. Either Tinder or Sanjay. There's a bit of discussion in terms of its timing. If you can share your thoughts on the volume of that and and what impact it could have on your E, timer and PCIe opportunity?

Yes.

So let me start.

We'll first of all, at the high level, we don't expect CPO to negatively impact our business in the near future. The current products that we have or even the next generation of products that we have, The way we look at it, at 200 gigabit per second per lane at the rack level, the connectivity will remain largely copper. And as a matter of fact, I think the industry will work very hard to even keep it at copper at 400 gigabit per second. The reason for that is our customers really prefer copper. The reason for that it is easier to deploy. When we go to optical specifically CPO type solutions, you introduce a lot of additional components into what used to be a purely silicon based package. Which has its own challenges for reliability as well as serviceability Astera. So in general, what you've seen from our customers is if they can stay with copper, they will stay with copper. If they cannot stay with copper because the bandwidth are too high and so on, they will go to pluggable optics. And then pluggable optics do not become feasible, only then do you go to, co package optics.

As a result, we see the first instance of co package optics happen when the data rates are the highest, the line speeds are the highest and the density of interconnect is the highest. Which typically happens in Ethernet switches. So, you know, our view is that that's where CPU will get deployed first. And that's not an area that we play in today. So it's not likely to impact our near to medium term revenues. And for the longer term, will continue to explore different media types and keep watching the space for the solutions customers might like from us. Great. Thank you. And Mike, can you talk about how should we think about OpEx for the year? [indiscernible] like we highlighted, we're going to continue to invest aggressively in the business Q1 is a bigger step up than typical given for the reasons we outlined including the small acquisition we did. So the rate of growth will hopefully normalize a little bit But right now, we really believe it's a time to press our advantage and invest in the business. We do have a goal of hitting a long term operating margin model of 40% operating margins. And that will be driven more by inflections in revenue growth versus our controlling our investment in R and D. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Suji Desilva of Roth Capital. Your line is open.

Hi, Chateau. This is Andre, Mike. First question, just to be clear on the customer focus. I know it's almost entirely hyperscale. I'm just curious if you've been approached by or trying to engage the emerging AI companies versus large established or if that doesn't fit in your business model?

It absolutely fits. And just to be very clear, right, we talk about hyperscalers because they are the ones that are deploying the big infrastructure right now in terms of AI training and so on. [indiscernible] As a company, we are tracking both the OEM space for enterprise application as well as the emerging AI focusing various different formats, right? So we are tracking it, but what we also believe is that first generation of systems that are being rolled out right now. Take something that's directly available from a company that's providing GPUs or folks that are integrating that into OEM level boxes. So that is the first generation, probably that will continue. Probably with a little bit more customization in Gen two before we start seeing more sort of hardware level decision in future generations. So overall, we are tracking it But the fact of the matter right now is bulk of the TAM that's available is through the hyperscalers and that's where we talked about. But at the same time, every OEM out there that's building AI servers, they are buying components from us either directly or through baseboards that they procure from GPU platform providers.

Okay. Appreciate all the color there.

Then my other question is on UA Link. I'm just wondering what you think the biggest challenges are timing impacts of cutting over from Ethernet, PCIe, UALink are and most importantly for Astera, what's the share and content uplift implications of maybe UA Link gaining traction?

No, it's a great question. So, UA Link promises to be a very good initiative for the industry to try to bring everybody together for a standardized scale up cluster. So we see a lot of benefit for Estero Labs because of our prominent position on the board. Over time, we will develop a full UILink portfolio to address the connectivity requirement at a rack level that our customers will have. In terms of the timing, the Standard Group is working to release the the standard, the final specification. That is supposed to happen at the end of Q1. So we expect the earliest products to hit the market sometime in 2026. Which is when we will start to see first instance of UOLINK.

Okay. Thanks. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Shannon of Craig Hallum. Your line is open. Hi guys. Thanks for taking my question as well. Will ask a question that kind of the competitive dynamics here.

Kind of going in between your over timer and P Series switch products, I guess, obviously, you have a really strong position to retimers. Coming to the market in the P Series, we've got another competitor who's very strong there. And while you've got Cosmos the software bears a switching there, Switches are generally thought of as more of a stickier kind of a chip. And so wondering how the competitive dynamics play out here Do we see kind of an attach rate similar to what you're seeing in the P Series to the Ares anytime soon?

Yes. So first of all, there's a big market. So let's keep that in mind when you start thinking about a switch type of socket. There are many sockets Gen six, Gen five, and so on. Right?

So there is several different areas that we can go and then surely the market is seeing that the competitors are seeing that and and you have folks that are playing there. The angle that we have taken, there is a software and cosmos point that you made. Which brings in a lot of diagnostic telemetry and fleet management type of features that scales across all of our products SCORPO retimers and everything else that we do. Right? But the bigger reason why Scorpio is gaining traction is how it's architected. The incumbent switches where we designed for storage applications So obviously, the feature set that were incorporated with more tuned for addressing and attaching to an SSD drives. What we have done is essentially created a device for the first time where the data flows are created for a GPU to GPU traffic. The bandwidth optimization and other capabilities that are needed. So in general, functionality itself is a lot better and that's being appreciated by by our customers. And based on that, we continue to build on the portfolio a significant role in that market.

And in terms of the timing itself, so there is a timing aspect here, obviously, Gen six windows now, I mean, as far as we know, we are the only ones in the market providing PCIe Gen six switches. So many times in connectivity what happens is the first vendor to provide a a solid product that is scaling and getting qualified. Those things go a long way in terms of maintaining and building a competitive barrier.

Okay, excellent. Thanks for those thoughts.

My second question is on the Scorpio Series. Wondered if you can kind of Give us a picture looking forward here about the size of the scale of domains that hyperscalers are looking to do. I can't remember the exact number of what NVIDIA does for their today, but I imagine it's going to go up quite a bit here. And to what degree does the size play into your commentary about the Scorpio eventually being your largest product line at the time? Thank you. Can I take a crack at that? This is Yitendra.

So we've mentioned previously that not counting NVLink or NVIDIA, we expect the market for Cortex family, the TAM to be $2,500,000,000 or more than that by 2028. And if you look at what it is today, it's effectively nearly zero.

So it's a very, very rapidly growing TAM and it's one of our large largest TAM that we have. Which is why we are bullish on the prospects of SCORP unit becoming the largest product Thank you. There are no further questions. Turn the call back over to Leslie Green for Thank you, JL, and thank you everyone for your participation and questions.

We look forward to updating you on our progress.

This concludes today's conference call. [indiscernible]