All right, we'd like to get started. Good morning, everyone. I'm Toshiya Hari, I cover the semiconductor space at Goldman Sachs. Very honored to have the team from Credo with us this morning. We have Bill Brennan, CEO, in the center. We've got Dan Fleming, our CFO as well. Bill and Dan, thank you so much for coming. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. I've got a bunch of longer-term questions, but I did want to start relatively short term. You're fresh off of your earnings call from last week. If you can kind of recap, you know, key highlights in the quarter, did anything surprise you? You're guiding October revenue up 11%, I believe, at the midpoint. What are some of the drivers that went into that? Sure The outlook for October? Yeah, I think generally, we're, you know, I'm really happy with the execution of the team. You know, I think one of the big focuses for us over the last several quarters has been, you know, product ramp, and we saw real results in the last quarter. So, you know, that's reflective of strong execution across the board from our team. The, you know, so no surprises there, and I think it's part of the theme that we've been talking about, the narrative that we've really talked about for this year. So going forward, I think, you know, we feel good. You know, I think we feel very good about, you know, our largest customer ramping strongly. We see that continuing throughout the year. I think generally, if we look kind of across our business, we see strength coming from really every area, you know, from a product standpoint. Yeah, feeling good about, you know, the upcoming quarter as well as the balance of the year. That's great. Last February, you surprised us all. In what sense? Don't want to rub it in, but. You mean two Februaries ago. That's correct. Okay. Not this February, but. Gotcha. the last February. Gotcha. Since then, to your point, you've executed really well, both in terms of delivering results and guiding to, if not above, Street consensus. Is the improved visibility a function of the environment being favorable, or do you feel like you have, you know, a deeper look into what customers are working on? Are they more open with their plans, their forecasts, et cetera? Has something permanently changed, or is this sort of you guys benefiting from a more favorable backdrop? Sure. Or both? So just to go back and touch on two Februaries ago. You know, it's really important to talk about what happened because we have a full view of what happened at this point. The big shift was the shift towards AI. Our largest customer, Microsoft, was, you know, the first mover, and I couldn't really describe two Februaries ago as to what the shift was that we saw that caused us to, you know, talk about a much lower expectation for that largest customer at the time. But it's super important from a theme standpoint because we've been involved in different AI developments, you know, for going on more than five years. Tesla, for example, we've been working on the Dojo supercomputer for more than five years. So we've always known that AI is gonna be wind in our sails. It's really gonna propel our growth. And that was an inflection point that happened, and at first it looked like, you know, super tough for us, but very quickly, we recognized that many, many programs were gonna be pulled forward. And when we think about AI clusters, and the difference there is that the back-end network is critical to the performance of the cluster. So you look at the density of connections, and you look at the speed of connections, and that moved the entire market all the way to the front, you know, all the way to the leading-edge technology, where we do very well. I think from that moment, you know, really probably three or four months after that, it was very clear that there was this massive pull from the market for higher speed connectivity and more connectivity associated with the AI clusters. We've seen nothing but that play out over the last several quarters, and we see it continuing to play out over the next several quarters. That's definitely fueling our optimism and the activity that we see that's gonna lead to, you know, continuing to grow our revenue in the future. Okay, got it. That's helpful. A couple of questions on AEC, which obviously is, you know, the largest business you guys run today. For starters, how big is the AEC market today, according to what you see? What percentage of the TAM have you been able to penetrate? I think on last week's call, you guys talked about AEC becoming sort of de facto standard for in-rack- Sure ... connectivity. What about other applications? What's sort of the catalyst to get you going on some of those newer applications, if you will? Yes, so the first part of the question is: How big is the market? And, you know, I think we're very much in the early innings of the market developing. If you look at, you know, where is the market coming from, typically, short in-rack connections have been made with passive copper cables. And so because of the speed of the connection and really the physics involved with communicating over copper, there has always been, you know, a feeling in the market, that eventually there will be a move away from passive copper cables, and you'll have to go to an active solution. For a long time, the market was thinking, they were assuming that it was gonna be an optical transition, and that's where we pioneered this market, in a sense. Let's, you know, keep the connection electrical on copper. You can use, you know, much thinner gauge wires and the signal integrity, you know, no longer becomes an issue. And so that market is growing. Our market is growing as the transition away from passive copper is happening. And so, you know, we're early stage. It's hard for me to gauge what the market size is. We're very near 100% of the market. Right. The market forecasters see this market being a multi-billion-dollar market long term, and so what we're really focused on is converting one customer at a time. When you say, you know, the de facto for Ethernet, yes, we've mentioned that, so especially as speeds go to 100 gig per lane, using passive copper really is not an option, and so AEC is becoming a de facto standard in a sense that we have customers that now call us, you know, when they hit that point, you know, where they need to find another solution. Right. It's important to note that with optical, there's also trade-offs, and they're not necessarily favorable, not just from a cost or power standpoint, but also from an MTBF standpoint, when you're talking about mission-critical connectivity. Looking at an AI cluster, you know, it's interesting because if one connection within the cluster fails, just intermittently, the industry refers to this as a link flap. We have one connection that needs to be reset. It'll take the entire cluster down. And so if you look at an AEC, the link flap is not an issue. You just don't see those failures. It's really related to the optics. And so this is, you know, another thing that heavily favors AEC connections where they can be made. On the call, I mentioned that we're seeing more activity around rack-to-rack connections, so 5m cable can span two racks, 7m cable can span three. And so, you know, as people are looking at now that, you know, the industry has had more than a year of deploying AI, AI clusters, you know, there are a group of people that look at failures that are happening within the clusters and talk about how do they address those failures over time. And this has been, you know, really recently, fueling conversations about how to rearchitect and in the industry, really recently, we've seen super impressive things from a power sourcing and cooling perspective that enables people to do more in a smaller footprint. And so making these two-rack or three-rack, you know, span connections is becoming possible. You know, if you can do that, and you can reduce the number of link flaps, you're gonna improve the, you know, the quality of the entire cluster and ultimately the efficiency across the board. That's a kind of a new thread that. Mm-hmm. That, you know, leads us to be optimistic about AECs. Got it, and Bill, you talked about, you know, converting, you know, one customer at a time. Right. You had a big number one customer, the number two customer ramping very aggressively. You've talked about number three and beyond. How should we think about sort of the dollar opportunity, dollar content opportunity evolving as you go from one customer to the next? Because not all data centers, obviously, are created equal, right? So I think, you know, I think a good way to look at that is to look at, you know, the application. Right Within a given customer. Right. The first customer that we ramped was really connections that were being made from servers to the front-end network, and this is traditionally what we all thought about as the network. Now that AI clusters, you know, are being deployed in a big way, the real large opportunity is the back-end network. And within the back end, there's two opportunities. There's the scale-out network and the scale-up network. And so, you know, I think if you look at dollar content, you can, you know—it's a hard question to answer. You've got to be specific- Right about, you know, are we comparing apples to apples? But as we ramp into AI clusters, the TAM increases for sure, and it's the effect is twofold. The number of connections is significantly larger, but also the speed of the connections, you know, are faster. And so there's a content difference whether you're selling a 100 gig cable or an 800 gig cable. You know, naturally, you know, the ASPs for an 800 gig cable are gonna be higher, but also the effect is there's many more connections, so that's adding to the dollar content, you know, for a given customer. Okay, got it. That's really helpful. You know, the advantages of AEC is pretty clear. Right. Data rates are increasing. We had Jensen this morning. He talked about the densification of data centers. Sure. All that stuff is really good for you. You got to reduce power. To the extent you've had episodes where you engage with a customer, but ultimately they decide not to transition to AECs, and maybe there hasn't been any situations, but to the extent there have been, you know, what was the pushback? Is it passive copper cable continuing to improve? Is it optical? What's sort of getting in the way? Yeah, so we've never had a situation where somebody has considered an AEC and then gone back to passive. And you know, I can say that comfortably as we talk about 100 gig per lane. Mm-hmm. It's not a conversation. I would say that the only time that people have looked at it and gone a different direction, it's purely based on an architectural approach. And there are deployments where, you know, you'll have racks of appliances and no switching within the rack, where the switches happen, you know, at the leaf and spine. And if you eliminate top of rack, there isn't a need for in-rack cabling. And so that's... You know, when people have looked at different architectures and have chosen to go with, you know, a TOR-less cluster architecture, that's where the opportunity hasn't, you know, ultimately. Materialized. Uh, materialized. Right. But, you know, we haven't seen a situation where a customer is considering passive AEC and something optical. Every single time, you know, it's landed on AECs. Okay. Got it. Maybe on customer diversification. I'm sure you guys hear this directly from investors a lot as well. You know, the concentration is something that some investors struggle with. I think it's really a product of your success and sort of pioneering this market. That's a very smart way of looking at it. But the question that we get from investors is: when do we start to see a Credo that is more diversified? I think you talked a little bit about, you know, tier two, or I guess, emerging CSPs. Maybe talk about, you know, the forward outlook from a customer profile standpoint. Sure. Sure. So, you know, I mean, you know, talking about our largest customer first, I feel very good about where we are. I think we're in the early innings of ramping that, and I mentioned that I don't expect it to be linear. You know, there's a surge and. You know, but ultimately, if we look at, you know, the several quarter outlook, we see that increasing. So they'll be our largest customer this year. Mm-hmm. There's no question about it. So, you know, measuring from a concentration standpoint, yes, you'll be able to point to that. But I also feel very comfortable about how the company is executing across our product lines and really with customers. So I expect that, you know, the first large customer we talked about, they'll return to historic levels, you know, in, say, the outer quarters and going into fiscal 2026. I mentioned a third hyperscaler that we're engaged with. My confidence is growing that we're gonna see a nice ramp in fiscal 2026. We may catch a little bit at the end of this fiscal year. But the confidence is driven just by the progress that we're making, working with them on qualification and talking about, you know, more efficient architectures, and we're just going deeper. So, I feel like that'll add to our diversity, you know, in fiscal 2026. I mentioned the, you know, this category that we're calling emerging hyperscalers. This is not new. We've talked in the past about, you know, this class of companies that's talking about, you know, large CapEx, and you're seeing companies out there spending a lot of money that you wouldn't consider being, you know, in the top five hyperscalers in the U.S. We've been designed into those architectures for some time, and so we've talked about being a beneficiary as they spend. We mentioned that this quarter, we'll have a new 10% customer. That's not a new customer for us. Right. but it is evidence of this class of, you know, new companies that spending, you know, actually, you know, following through on that. Hard for us to say how that looks, but typically, somebody's not gonna build one data center and stop, right? So if anything, you know, that will become a part that adds to the diversity of the company. We've talked about optical, and I'm sure we'll get into it. Yep. But, you know, for our team, about twelve months ago, I said: Look, we need to achieve 10% of our revenue in fiscal 2025, 10% or higher, you know, with Optical DSPs, and I think we're well on track for that. So I see that adding to diversity, you know, as we look into. Mm-hmm Into 2026 and 2027, as we continue to grow that business. We've talked about entering the PCIe market. Mm-hmm. You'll see that we'll make announcements later this year for PCIe Gen 6. So what we'll bring to market is solutions that'll be used inside appliances, so retimers that will be put on those boards. We'll be delivering a set of AEC solutions along with it as the scale-up architecture goes rack-scale. And then we're also gonna have options that can be integrated into optical solutions as the scale-up network goes cluster-scale. And so that'll add to our diversity over time as well. So it's a combination of expanding our customer base, as well as expanding our footprint within, you know, the different business lines that we're pursuing. Right. Right. And that's gonna take place over, you know, over really the next, you know, few years- Mm-hmm. As we grow as a company. Got it. Okay. I'll definitely come back to optical. Maybe on competition in AEC, I think ever since the IPO, you guys have talked about you expecting competition, if anything, competition sort of being an endorsement of what you've been. Sure. Trying to do. A couple of your competitors are talking more about AECs. I don't think they're in full production or they've won significant designs. What are you seeing from a competitive standpoint, and what are your expectations going forward? I think it's encouraging, you know, when a market that you've pioneered, you know, gets to the point where we've got, you know, other companies are spending money and targeting that market. Mm-hmm. That's encouraging, and it's evidence that I think the market forecasters are on the right path in thinking that this is a very large market. You know, I think that we haven't seen a big shift competitively from the last time we talked. We see competitors coming in with samples for qualification. Going through a qualification process is, it's not a fun thing. It's a difficult thing to get through. And so I think that that's probably the stage. We haven't seen anybody, you know, reach volume production yet. But understand, this is a fast-moving target. Mm-hmm. And so the way I think about things competitively, what we're trying to do is ultimately deliver to our customers in a way that's hard to compete with. But that's not really saying, "I got to be better than my competition." It's really: How do we serve our customers in a better way? And we're organized in a way that I think we're able to do that. So we've taken complete ownership of the system. It is not as simple as putting a retimer into a connector. You know, that's a gross underestimation of what's required. What we've seen is that our customers, if we open the door for them to innovate, they'll come through the door and come in with features that they request, both hardware and firmware features, that make the rack design, you know, that much more efficient, and so we're, you know, organized in a way that, you know, I can work on 20 or more different SKUs at the same time for different customers. We've built, you know, a capability to not only deliver the system solution, but qualify it internally, and we're actually doing qualifications for our customers now. That you know, that's a level that, you know, simply you don't think about if you're just trying to sell a chip to a cable company. So I think the approach that, you know, that we're taking allows us to respond more quickly to the demands of the customer, as well as I think there's. I think it's pretty natural that if, if you're gonna take something into high volume production, you really want to buy that from one person. Right. You want one party to be responsible, you know, from the qualification all the way through any kind of issues that you have in production. And that's why I feel more confident the further we go, that we've picked the right model to be on. Mm-hmm. It ultimately is measured by feedback from the customer. Right. You know, if we deliver flawlessly and predictably, you know, I think that's encouraging from the standpoint of, like, trusting the model you've chosen. Right. And your model at this point is still very unique. The competitors do not follow. You know, I think it's unique in the sense that we've fully embraced. Mm-hmm. The accountability- Right. For the product line, but I don't think it's unique in a sense that the work needs to be done, and if it's one party doing the work, it's way more predictable than a group of companies doing the work. Mm-hmm. And potentially looking at each other as the shortfall Right. You know, if there is one. Right. Makes sense. Optical DSPs, to your point earlier, great momentum, 10% plus of fiscal year 2025 revenue. Where are you seeing the traction? What's resonating with customers? I know it's, you know, still a small base, but where do you see the momentum? Sure. Yeah. This has been a long road for us. Yes. Right? And, you know, hats off to the leader in the market for doing such a great job developing the market and delivering. We're on, you know, I think, our fourth generation of DSP now. I feel better than ever about our ability to deliver good performance measured by bit error rates, interoperability, power, and ultimately having a disruptive position from a cost standpoint. This market is not a rich market from a gross margin standpoint. Mm-hmm. Our customer base. Mm-hmm. You know, the neighborhood that our customers live in, if they are in a really nice neighborhood within that market, is in the 30%-40% gross margin area. And so naturally, there's an opportunity for disruption. And so that's you know, that's really our focus, right? And I feel great about our ability to deliver on all fronts. The market's interesting in a sense that the market doesn't move at the, you know, at all at once, from 100 gig to 400 gig, and 400 to 800, and 800 to 1.6. There's a large 50 gig per lane market that we're ramping into and really emerging as the clear leader. The 100 gig market is gonna be a multiyear market, and we've never been in a better position, you know, with the products that we're bringing to market and the engagements that we're seeing at a customer level. We missed the first two movers. NVIDIA were not part of that architecture, and Google as well, but the rest of the market's wide open, and we're here on time and engaging early, and that, I think, is gonna play out over many, many years, and so that's where I see us gaining market share, really, over the next, you know, two or three years. The 1.6T market will follow. We took a path to be the lowest power in the industry, so we're going straight to three nanometer. Everything in the market right now is at five nanometer and just simply not competitive from a power standpoint, as measured by the end customers, the hyperscalers. Right. And so I feel good about our strategy, you know, in 1.6T to kind of ramp as that market takes off as well. Okay. On an apples-to-apples basis, how cost competitive are you vis-a-vis the incumbent? Rough numbers. Yeah. So now understand that you're talking about what we've talked about as the N minus one strategy. Mm-hmm. Where if our competitors are in a more advanced process geometry, and we're able, from an architectural standpoint, to build competitive solutions in something that's, you know, one process or two more mature, our cost- if we're able to manage also the size of the design- Mm. Our cost base is, you know, we could be as much as, you know, 50% lower from a cost standpoint, in that case. For the 1.6T market, we've listened to the call to action for power, and so we're actually first to go to three nanometer. Right. You can say that, you know, the whole N minus one story may be shifting. Mm. You know, so ultimately, we're responding to the market demand for lower power, but we'll be in three nanometer, and, you know, probably our competition, if they want to match us on power, will need to go to two nanometer. Mm-hmm. You know, just because of the architectural advantages we're bringing. But that's probably not gonna be, you know, a long-term part of the conversation. Right. Right. Okay. Maybe I'll pause here, I've got a bunch still, and see if anyone has any questions. Yeah, a question. The around the 5m to 7m rack-to-rack opportunity for AECs, you brought up that, architecturally, some designs don't have a top-of-rack switch, which would be the classic in-rack AEC use case, and have a kind of row of switches adjacent to the racks. Is that something that opens back up into the AEC market as you get into the 5m to 7m length, where even if it was a design that has kind of leaf switches adjacent to the rack, as we densify those networks, AEC becomes addressable for that architecture as well? Yeah, so I'd say that there's when we first imagined the market, you know, we definitely targeted 7m, and the idea was that, you know, AECs could span two or three rack connections. What ultimately developed was the market was really for in-rack, from NIC to TOR, and also switch racks, where you're, you know, connecting switch to switch, switch to switch, so you know, for the last few years, we didn't see much demand for 5m or 7m, but as clusters are being built and there's progress being made on power sourcing and also cooling, it allows for the densification. You know, some of the things that we've seen in the last three or four months are super impressive. You know, if you look at the density, and that and it's enabled by, again, power sourcing and cooling. If you look at the Pareto of failures for a cluster, and you have zero, you know, link flaps for AECs, and all of the link flaps that you're having are on optical, it's natural to say: How can we architect in a more dense way so that we can have the switches be closer to the appliances? And so that's where this 5m to 7m market is kind of now emerging. We're working with a lead customer that's literally re-architecting so that they can, you know, they can have AEC connections between, you know, the racks of appliances and the switches. I will say that our approach to the market is maybe a little bit different than a typical, you know, IC supplier. We're really a connectivity company. And so when I talk about this effect, I'm naturally thinking about what can we do with our optical DSPs to help address the problem in the market, you know, that's being seen. So it's not as if, you know. Yes, absolutely, we'll deliver this capability to the market with AECs, but I'm really looking beyond that to say, what's the next innovation that we can deliver to help address the problems that our customers are having? So I see, you know, yes, there's an opportunity for AECs, but I even see beyond that to say: How do you deliver a zero-flap cluster? Any other questions? Just one question. Yeah. So, for what you have mentioned about what have been seen in the last, like, three or five months, and what would be the, you know, for the in terms of the revenue and the guidance, is there any change for the whole year guidance or something? You mean for our fiscal year? Fiscal year. Yeah, I would say that, you know, it's for the fiscal year. So we're four months into the fiscal year now, so eight months to go. And really, you know, the ideas that we're talking about here will play out over a longer period of time. Mm-hmm. I would say that anything that's kind of near term is really in flight. There's always puts and takes, you know, when you look at, you know, what's happening within a given fiscal year. But everything we're talking about is really FY 2026, 2027, and really beyond. Maybe bring Dan into the conversation. Gross margin, product gross margins in the quarter, really impressive. Curious what drove the sequential and year-over-year increase. I think the guide for the quarter implies a step down Q over Q. What's driving that? Is that conservatism or is there something going on? Yeah. So let me first say, the headline should have been last week. From a product perspective, a strong execution. We had. If you exclude product engineering services from the way you look at revenue, product revenue was up 32% sequentially. So that increasing scale gave us some natural leverage to increase that gross margin. The product gross margin expanded by over 900 basis points in the quarter, from Q4 to Q1. So we had a lot of favorable tailwinds, is what I'd say. So it's the scale, which I highlighted on the call, but there are other things as well, kind of the usual suspects. We had favorable product mix, favorable manufacturing variances. You know, we can't always assume we'd have those going forward, so there is some natural conservatism built into our guide. Overall, we said, you know, IP revenue will grow modestly from Q1, which implies that of that 11% sequential increase that we projected, you'd also have product growth as well. And we guided kind of flat overall gross margin wise. So we should be in the same zip code. There's nothing specific driving it one way or the other. But you know, longer term, we're within you know, eyesight of that long-term gross margin model that we had laid out three years ago, which is 63%-65%. You know, we were nearly 63%, with a predominant revenue mix being product last quarter. So you'll continue to see that trend evolve over the next few quarters and into next year. Got it. Okay. Maybe one on R&D and how to think about leverage, OpEx leverage going forward. I think you guys have talked about OpEx growing at roughly half the rate of revenue, which is great. You're driving the leverage. At the same time, Bill, just talking to you, it feels like you've got massive opportunity ahead of you. You do maybe not have competition, direct competition today, but you've got large competitors who are kind of coming your way. How are you able to deliver that kind of leverage? How do you balance sort of investing in growth versus delivering, you know, margins and returns for your investors today? Sure. It seems like we're doing a lot. Yeah. We are. Yeah. For us, the core is the SerDes technology. Right. You know, that's the core of everything that we do. You know, we think that, you know, if you're gonna be in the connectivity space, you know, that's gotta be the initial building block. From there, everything we're doing is a leverage from that core. So it may seem like we're in different areas, but it's really, you know, almost like the, you know, the application-specific implementation of this core technology. So we are, you know, growing from an R&D standpoint. And the question is: Can you grow your top line, you know, revenue, faster than your expenses are growing? And I think we're in that stage. So, we're very much heavily, you know, investing. Mm-hmm For sure, and we're gonna continue that from, you know, from the standpoint of, you know, the foreseeable outlook. Got it. Okay. Another question that I often get from investors is on M&A. You frankly, as a buyer and a seller, I think to your point, you know, you've got really competitive SerDes technology. I don't think many companies globally have that. So I often get the question: Why wouldn't Companies A, B, and C be interested in Credo? The other question I have is kind of the other way of looking at it, is, okay, you guys are doing really well today, but you do have large competition. Over the long run, does Credo need to become bigger? So not bigger for the sake of being bigger, but do they need more IP? Do they need more parts to be successful long term? How would you sort of respond to those questions? Yeah, appreciate the question. Yeah. I do get some, so I'm just. I'm kidding. Don't shoot the messenger. Yeah. You know, I think that, you know, I think the NVIDIA-Mellanox combination, you know, has kind of turned a light on to the entire industry about the importance of connectivity. I think it's, you know, center stage, the spotlight on the things that we do. AI cluster is not a cluster if it's just GPUs. Mm-hmm. The connectivity was really the key piece. So does that become, you know, table stakes to compete with them? Right. Right? And so that's... we've seen a, you know, a lot of conversations around, you know, how do certain people in the industry respond to the lead that NVIDIA has? It's an interesting conversation, maybe more academic for us at this point, but we don't really think too much, you know, about that. On the other end of the spectrum, you know, of course, we're-- you know, we do have a currency now. Mm-hmm. You know, we do have the ability to consider certain adds to our resource base or certain adds from a technology standpoint, and I think we're, you know, we're eyes wide open as it relates to, you know, different pieces that could complement what we're doing. There's a lot of opportunity, you know, in the future as we look at, you know, 1.6T and even beyond. Mm-hmm. And I think the winners are gonna bring creative solutions to the market that are going to be system level. And of course, we're thinking through that. It feels good to have the currency that we've got right now. Okay, great. Maybe in the last minute, anything that we haven't touched that is topical, you wanna highlight? I know we're keeping you busy with meetings all day. Anything. No, I appreciate that. Of course. It's all you. Anything we collectively miss about the Credo story, or what you guys are working on, what you're excited about? You know, I think, you know, you've done a great job. I appreciate the fact we got more time today than we typically have had. But I think generally, you know, include me in the category of being very bullish about AI long term. Mm-hmm. You know, there's a lot of conversation: Are we in a bubble? Yes. You know, bubbles are measured, what, by if there's less CapEx next quarter than this quarter. That's not the category I'm in. You know, I'm very bullish about the application. I'm very bullish about the activity that we're seeing. I'm bullish about the potential expansion of the customer base beyond the five U.S. hyperscalers, and that being a long-term trend. You know, I think this is technology that's gonna, you know, that's really gonna democratize the end customer space. So, I really couldn't be more excited about the market that we're pursuing. Okay. Great place to end. Thanks. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you, all. Thanks.