Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us at the 2026 Mizuho Global Tech Conference. It's my distinct absolute pleasure to welcome back CEO David Goeckeler and CFO Luis Felipe Visoso. I hope I got that right. Thank you. you. That was great. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you for joining us at the Mizuho Tech Conference. What a year it's been, David. It's been a great year. Thanks for having us back. Last year, stock was around $60 at this time. Is that right? It's $1,800 now. Okay. 30x. Wow. I think that's a mic drop moment. I think the fireside is over. Is it? I think we should be gone from here. It's kind of hard to drop the mic when it's on your ear. Yes. I think, if there was a "Times" magazine for the best of the company and best management, it's right here, guys. What can I say? I think thank you for joining us again. Welcome back. We really appreciate it. What did they say? AI is hungry for compute, but survives on storage. Oh. Very nice. There you go. Very nice. My team did some good work on you guys, trying to get these one-liners done. Okay. Let me start off, obviously. Hey, VJ, before we start, if you don't mind. Yes. Go ahead. Just want to read this. We will be making forward-looking statements in today's discussions, including with respect to our technology, our products, our business plans and performance, market trends and opportunities, and our future financial results. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from expectations. Please refer to the risk factors outlined in our annual report on Forms 10-K and 10-Q, and other filings with the SEC for more information. Thank you, VJ. Fantastic. I think we got all of it. I just wanted to start off with a quick run through the numbers. Last year, fiscal 2025, June, you guys were doing $7 billion. This year, fiscal 2026, June, $20 billion. Next year, street consensus is like $45 billion. What's happening here? I'm just kidding. I think I wanted to take a step back and, David, maybe give us a little bit of the lay of the land. What are you seeing on the supply-demand side? NAND bit growth has been growing low 20s. How do you see that going forward? Demand is obviously accelerating, but maybe you can take a step back and give us a peek into what you are seeing. Yeah. Your question, what's happening here, is like anything, a market this dynamic, a lot of things are happening at the same time. It's fun to be here, by the way, to be here with you in a year on. Thank you. This is also the same room where we actually launched the company. Yes. We did our investor day here. Hopefully next year, we come back, it's 10x. It's good to be back here. If you look back to then, we had the same level of conviction we have now. We see a market with sustained mid to high teens growth. We always thought that the technology wasn't fully appreciated for the value that we were bringing. I think over the last year, we've done a good job of figuring that out, right? Yeah. In terms of understanding what the value of the technology is. Clearly, there's a lot of AI demand that's helping that equation. Data center has now become or is quickly becoming the largest market in NAND. We've had many revisions of data center CapEx going up. I think, Luis, you were telling me earlier, it's 14 revisions now. 14 times. 14 times, all going up. A lot of that is as AI moves into inference. I think our customers are figuring out the architecture for how to. The microphone go away. Our customers. There you go. Are working on what is the architecture for inference? That's when NAND becomes a big part of that equation. Yeah. We've seen it with, people talk about with KV cache or RAG. NAND has always been the most scalable semiconductor technology. As you start to scale any architecture, I think it's naturally going to come towards NAND- Yeah. If you need storage. I think that it's a very difficult question, I think our customers have, which is: What is the right architecture for scaling inference on a global basis? Yeah. Figuring out what's the right concentration of processing power, what's the right concentration of DRAM, HBM, what's the right concentration of NAND. It's very use case dependent. Trying to figure out what the use case is several years in the future is an issue all of its own. I think that as our customers go through that equation and figuring that out, they're coming to the conclusion that having longer term relationships with suppliers of NAND is a very good idea. Yeah. I think that's what we're putting together with these business agreements. Yeah. It's changing the trajectory of our business, I think in a very positive way. Got it. It's a very powerful relationship between us and our customers, and it's very much of a win-win conversation. Yeah. A lot has changed in the last year, but I really do think we're just getting started. Yeah. There's been a lot said about AI, but extremely fundamental technology shift that we're clearly in the very early innings. I think the productivity that people are seeing out of this technology is nothing short of spectacular. Yeah. I think our technology is a big part of delivering that. Sure on a global basis. Yeah. I want to get to those LTAs and NVMs a little bit later so we can get Luis involved in that, but I want to get back to the technology roadmap. Obviously, your enterprise SSD has grown massively. Yes. It's almost 25% of the revenues now. Used to be a much smaller number, might be mid-single digit last year. It's grown 7x year-over-year. It's just starting off because you guys are just starting to get qualified on enterprise SSD, QLC SSDs, et cetera. How do you see that if you were to roll this forward 12 months, how do you see that market growing? How do you see your wins? How sticky is this with the CSPs? Yeah. First of all, you're 100% correct. It all starts with the technology, right? If you don't have great products, we're a technology company. You have to have great products. Yeah. That's like the basics. Right. We do have great products, all the way from the fundamental NAND, which we can talk about, into the portfolio we have. It's been no secret, we've been investing heavily in enterprise SSD. It's a part of the market where we've been under-penetrated, and it's about building the right portfolio to increase our mix in that part of the market. Yeah. There's really two major categories of products there. There's a performance-based TLC NAND product. Yeah. Used a lot for KV cache and a number of things. That's been the driver of the portfolio over the last year. The second part of the portfolio is the storage-based product. Capacity-based. It's called Stargate Project. We talked about it again here back in February when we launched the company. Right. This is the first quarter we'll recognize revenue on that product. You're right, we're just getting started on that leg of the. Yeah. Of the portfolio. Obviously, we've got one side of the portfolio in full bloom and deployed across multiple customers and driving the. Yeah. Significant growth you mentioned earlier. Now we've got the second leg of that growth coming. Where's that going to lead to over the next year? I think you're going to see the mix of data center go higher. Yeah. I'm not going to put a specific number on it. Sure. Yeah. What we like to have is a lot of optionality in our portfolio. Absolutely. Every quarter is different. It's changing a little bit now with the business models. We'll get into that. Yeah. We believe that a robust portfolio where we can cover as much of the market as possible is the best for long-term profitability of our franchise. Right. I think we're unique in the fact that we have a global consumer business that already gives us a great starting point. We have a great client business, and now we're building out that great enterprise SSD business. I think it puts the company in just a fantastic position as far as what options we're going to have in the future to get the best financial return. Yeah, definitely. I think talking about optionality and trying to optimize the business to get the most profitability out of it, obviously, when you're looking at the enterprise SSD market, it gives you good visibility. You have massive orders coming in from the CSPs. On the other side, you have exposure to many of the conventional markets where you have much better pricing power. How do you decide where to allocate? You want to take that one, Luis? Yeah, we like all our customers, right? We want them all to be successful. At the end of the day, we produce a wafer and we have to make a decision where we allocate it. We want to have a portfolio that's balanced across segments, right? Because that's more sustainable over time. We don't want to maximize value just for this quarter, but over time. We're constantly making choices on where we allocate BiCS, and the new business models are a foundation for that. Got it. Let me flip that question. You see pricing in conventional NAND going up. When you look at these SSD LTAs or the contracts that you get on the CSP side, are those tethered to where market pricing would be? You don't want to leave money on the table either. Right? You're not running a charity, you're running a business model. How do those arguments work out, I guess? In general, there are fixed price components within these new business models, which I believe are important. There are parts of the agreement are with a, let's call it a floor and a ceiling of pricing. Right. The reason we did that is because none of us wanted to be unhappy, right? Yeah. If prices go up, we would be unhappy because we would not be capturing the upside. If prices go down, our customers would be uncompetitive- Got it. Their peers would be paying lower prices. Yeah. We established this floor and ceiling concept for some of our contracts and for some of the time within that. Yeah. Importantly, as we said in our earnings call, even in the low prices, we like the margins. This is how we structure them. Margins will be consistent with the margins that we guided in for the fourth quarter, for our fiscal fourth quarter. Got it. There's a little implicit assumption, I think, within your question I just want to touch on. We're not trading duration for price, right? Right. That's not the value proposition. The value proposition is continuity of supply. Yeah. Price is price. Price is whatever's fair for both of us. Right. You can assume we have somewhat unique insights into price being in the market. Yeah. I don't like to discuss price. The other thing I'll say, look, I think there's three things we're trying to do, and there's three things I think in any technology franchise we want to do. Number one, we want to get a fair price for our technology. We work very hard on it. People are professionals. We want to get a fair price. Yeah. I think we've gotten to that point. You can argue, could we get more? Yeah. If we can get more, we'll get more. That's our job. Right. We'll continue to have that conversation. Number two, we want to get rid of the volatility. Yeah. On the economics. I think especially in our industry, this is an issue. Yeah. There's been so much volatility. Cyclicality. Up and down, cyclicality. Yeah. I've said this many times, it's just corrosive on the industry. It makes it difficult to invest in the industry. Right. It makes all the decisions harder. We want to work on that. The third thing we want to do is we want to grow. Yeah. We're a business. We want to grow as a business. Well, I think one of the most interesting things about our technology franchise is we have a built-in growth lever of more volume every year. Yeah. We're talking about mid to high teens bit growth. That's more volume every year. I think that's fairly unusual in a large technology business. Yeah. That just, like next year, we know we're going to have more volume. Yeah. We have a debate sometime about, well, should you be growing faster? Yeah. The issue is all three of these variables are related. If you start growing faster, you oversupply the market, and then pricing comes down and volatility goes up. Yeah. It's really about balancing all three of these, and that's really what we're trying to do as a management team, is get all those three balanced. To your point, not leave anything on the table. Right. The future is uncertain. Yeah. You can get to the future, and you find out it tips in the other direction. Yep. That's where the new business models are really getting at that second issue. That's why we call them new business models. Yes. That was Luis's name. He came up with that. Very innovative. It's like, how do we put a new business model around this. Right. Our business with our customers in a way Yeah. That we can achieve all of these things? Yeah. I think we're not done yet, but I think we're making good progress on that. Got it. Going back to the cyclicality point that you just raised, it's a very interesting point because this industry has been plagued with that. It's kind of labeled very cyclical, and so it comes with. I've heard. Much lower multiple, I guess. How do you convince the investor base that this time it's different? You have better visibility. There is a technology roadmap here. The players are more rational, more disciplined. There is more of a focus on making profit than being cyclical supply. Yeah. Well, there's nothing I can do about other players in the market or anything else. We only manage our company. Right. What we can do is be transparent about what we're doing and explain what we're doing and why do we think that the way we're doing it is better than the way it's been done in the past. Yeah. I think generally that's what we do all the time. We're innovators. Yeah. We invent things. We do things differently. We have the confidence that we can change things and get a better outcome in the future. Yeah. We're not prisoners to the past. Yeah. Believe me, I've been told many, many times about the cyclicality in this industry. Yeah. Whenever you bring up the word LTA, the first thing the person across the table starts saying is all the reasons they won't work. They start rolling their eyes. Yeah. There's so much scar tissue, and there's so much Right. History. Yeah. I get it. How do I disprove something? It's very hard to disprove something, except you just keep putting points on the board. Yeah. That's what we do. We keep putting the numbers up. Again, we were here back in February of 2025. Yeah. We stood on a stage in this very room, and we made the case for our company. Yeah. Did people believe us? I don't know if they did or not. They gave us, like, a $6 or $7 billion valuation. Yeah. Now they have a little more belief, right? Yeah. For the people that believed a year and a half ago, it's turned out very, very well for them. Absolutely. Everybody has to make their own decisions. We've clearly made our decisions. I spend every day, all day at the company- Yeah. Managing this company, and we're fully invested in it, and we have a lot of confidence in what the future's going to hold. Yeah. We're going to keep being transparent, and we're going to keep doing what we think are very smart things. We're going to be open. We're going to keep coming to meetings. We had great meetings all day, where we hear feedback from the people that own our company. Yeah. We factor that in, and then we move forward and make the best decisions we can. Yeah. We think we have a tremendous franchise, and we're very focused on getting the most out of it we can. That's very great to hear. I remember last, since you brought it up, talking about things being done better. Last February, the analyst day asked you a question, "Why did you move from WD to Sandisk?" you said because you saw much better innovation, a much more exciting roadmap at Sandisk. I guess you proved it right. to that point, as you look at your whole TLC SSDs and QLC SSDs on the enterprise SSD side, you guys have lagged the market, but now you're catching up. What changed? What is the differentiation in your SSD roadmap today that is giving you that design win rate versus your peers that was not there last year? It really started more than last year. These are long design cycles. Right. These are, like, three or four years at least. Building an ASIC is not easy. then getting qualified at a major customer can be a two-year process. this started years and years ago. if I think of Sandisk and just at a big picture-There's all these different episodes of Sandisk, if you will. It was just a tremendous consumer company, tremendous IP. I think it went into Western Digital, and inside of Western Digital, what you would have expected happened- Got lost. Which is it became a great client Yeah. Business. It was like the rise of client. Why was that? In my opinion, you were, and I wasn't there. I didn't witness all of it, but I'm just looking at the history. NAND was replacing the hard drive and the client, so you knew the customer, you knew the use case, you knew how to test it, you knew what all the features were, and you could build a tremendous portfolio there, and a lot of innovations and systems for the first DRAM-less client, all these innovations. All of this expertise on building systems for consumer brought into building systems for clients. Enterprise. You had a new management team come in six years ago that had more of an enterprise background and started bringing an enterprise bent to this, like how do we get the right engineering teams? How do we get the right projects? Projects are very, very difficult. They go on for years, and it's the culmination of hundreds of decisions that happen every week. Yeah. That eventually lead you to having the right portfolio for the right market. we've just run that play long enough now with an unbelievable internal team that has all of the expertise in how to build NAND controllers, applying all of that to the enterprise market. when you do that for long enough- Yep. You end up with great products. we're very, very happy with where we are. Fantastic. Last one. Last question on the SSD side, and then we'll move on to something more exciting, HBF. Okay. First, on the SSD side, as you look at KV cache demand and some of the CMX racks that NVIDIA talks about, are you seeing that gain a lot of traction? You obviously have agentic AI and all that demand coming in as well, but that's supposedly going a different route. from the KV cache side itself, are you seeing a very big pull-through from the CSPs? Yeah. I think undoubtedly this is a very big backdrop- Yeah. In the industry, where, as I said earlier, I think, AI, there was just a huge focus in the early days, appropriately so, on model training. You don't really have AI until you have a model. Yes. Enormous amount of focus on building out the systems for training models. I think we've all learned over the past several years that these models are extremely valuable. That you can do amazing things with them. I'm an enterprise software guy for 30+ years. The amount of change that's happening to the discipline of writing software is almost spectacular- Yeah. Once you get that, you have to scale it. Yeah. You have to scale inference. I think there's now a number of spectacular companies in the world that can scale technology globally in a way that's never happened before. Yeah. Cloud-based computing is unbelievable. It used to be, to scale technology, you actually had to ship the technology to every single. I'm old enough to understand this. Yeah. You used to have to ship technology to every single person. Now you just point your device On a CD. To the cloud that has the most- Yeah. Sophisticated technology in the world, and you're up and running. The friction of deploying technology in the world has just almost been completely removed. Yeah. Except for the people that are doing that work. It's extraordinary work- Right. To build a global infrastructure to distribute technology. I think those companies are very focused on, how do I scale inference globally? To do that, you've got to know the use case you're scaling for. It's got to be done in an economic way. You have to be able to do it in a predictable timeframe. Yep. I think as people have been going through those conversations, they've been, what is the right mix of compute? What's the right mix of DRAM? What's the right mix of HBM? What's the right mix of NAND? And that's a very dynamic question- Yeah. That changes based on what use case you're assuming. What's the power of the model? How big is it? this is a very dynamic equation that's kind of happening in real time. And I think, the big-picture answer to that question is you need a lot more NAND. Yeah. Because NAND is the most scalable semiconductor technology. And if you're going to scale something economically, you're going to want to use as much of the most- Yeah. Scalable technology that you possibly can. Yep. I think that's led to this whole process of discovering what is the true value of this technology to the world. It's a capacity versus cost question. How much capacity- It's a capacity versus cost, and yeah. NAND has been something where it's been almost always focused on density. Yeah. Now it's focused more on high performance. Right. It's a much more multidimensional- Yeah. Equation. Talking about high performance, I want to go to this HBF. There's obviously a lot of excitement around that high-bandwidth flash, which is similar to HBM in the sense that you stack 16 layers of NAND. You have a logic-based CMOS bonded array at the bottom. Maybe we can talk to how you see that technology evolving, because it starts to deliver the bandwidth of DRAM at a cost that's 1/10 of DRAM. It has its challenges, whether it's write or endurance, speed, endurance, et cetera. Maybe we can talk to where you see your roadmap. I know you guys have talked about HBF in the second half of 2026 and might be the controller hardware in the first half of 2027, but maybe you can give us some more color there. Yeah. I think the whole original idea from HBF came out of the conversation we just had, except it happened years ago by a bunch of very smart people- inside the company that were basically. If you were a NAND designer, for your whole life, you've been told, "Give me more density." More density. That was kind of the whole idea of designing new NAND nodes. Now you have this. I think they saw this. Well, I don't think they know they saw this inference use case coming, where you have these very large models. I need a lot of storage. For NAND to work in that inference use case, you had to solve some other problems. Yeah. The one good thing about inference is a very deterministic equation. You know what the model is. It's not like training, where you're building the model. You know what the model is. Yeah. You need to load it into a CPU as fast as you can. The team started thinking about, how do I re-architect NAND for higher bandwidth, higher write bandwidth? Yeah. How do I get to some of the endurance questions, right? An enormous amount of intellectual property was developed over those years, right? Obviously, we don't talk about that. That's our intellectual property. It basically said, "Hey, at some point, the world is going to need more storage for inference. Yeah. Can we design a NAND die that solves that problem? That was kind of, I think, the genesis of HBF. We were working on it for quite a long time before we launched the company last year. We thought that was the right time to start talking about it- Yeah. Because we were launching the company. I think one of the most satisfying things that's happened over the last year and a half since we launched the company is, I think there was a lot of skepticism when we first started talking about it. Yeah. I think that there's a lot less now. Right. I think it's like people can see, hey, inference is a memory-bound problem as much as it's bound by the GPU bound. Yeah. How can we bring more memory, more storage to inference? That's what HBF is all about. Now, the challenging side of it is, it's not just a plug-compatible replacement for something in the current AI inference architecture. Yeah. It's a system play. You have to change other parts of the system to get- Right. The whole thing to work. that's the process we're in now, is talking to customers about how they're going to design inference, whether it's on a device or whether it's in the cloud. Yeah. How does our technology plug into that? Yeah. That's an iterative process, right? They're trying to figure out what the use case is, what they want to build. We're telling them what the capabilities are. Right. You're constantly changing both sides of that equation. In the meantime, we're off building the die, right, which we expect to have later this year. we're building the controller that actually controls the die and actually- Right. Delivers a product, and we'll have that available sometime next year. Got it. We're going through that process, and we're iterating on that process with our customers to get it to lock into a specific use case, which then we can commercialize. Got it. We're in that process right now. Got it. when you think about working with the customers, is that you're getting a lot of interest from the CSPs enterprise? Is that- Well, we haven't really talked about which customers, and we don't want to- Yeah. Talk about that just yet. Got it. We think it plays across the device all the way to the cloud. I think that's Got it. what's really good about the technology. as models get bigger, as context- Yeah. Lengths get bigger, as agentic comes, mixture of experts models- Right. All of these things are tailwinds for that kind of technology- Got it. Becoming more relevant. This would be more of an on-die HBM, similar to an HBM. Is that fair? that's not the same? Well, you would build a NAND die. It's like a big state product. Right. A new die type for that's optimized for this use case. Got it. The one other pushback we hear is, you seem to have solved the bandwidth problem. Maybe the bandwidth is 1.6 Tb or higher, similar to an HBM, but it has latency. What's your thoughts around that? The latency is higher than typical NAND. Well, we could get into a very technical conversation very quickly. That's the last question on that. We'll go on to easier ones. You're in a deterministic read here, so it's like- Yes. Pipelined. You know what you're going to. The latency is only at the beginning. Yeah. Once you get going, you're going. Yeah. Got it. That's a very high-level, very simplistic answer. Okay. I won't belabor it. Thank you. We understand that issue, and that's part of the issue of why we work as a system level. Right. You're not just going to plug it in for something else that was in the system. Got it. Everybody needs to change a little bit Yeah. To get a much better answer. Yeah. What's technology without a challenge, right? Well, that's where the value is. Yeah. If anybody could do it, if you could just wake up and build this stuff- That's right. That's right Because it takes a long time and a lot of very smart people. Yeah. It's very valuable. Absolutely. That's why all these people here want to invest in our company, hopefully- There you go. Because we're doing stuff that's very innovative. Waiting for the next 10x, I guess. It's not just that there's an economic benefit for us. Right. That's like the second-order issue. The first-order issue is it provides to our customers a very compelling value proposition Yeah. That allows them to build a more economic business or allows them to build, to deliver a better service to their customers. Yeah. That's the first step. They have spectacular businesses. Yeah. That's why you asked me why, you said earlier about why did I come to the NAND business. The NAND business is incredible. It's like every device in the world uses NAND at some level. Yeah. Our customers are just like a who's who of every single spectacular technology company in the world. Right. Those are all the people we get to work with every single day. Yeah. Figure out how we can innovate so they can deliver an incredible product. Yeah. I think it's the satisfaction of solving a problem and opening the next- That's what you do- Yeah. In our business. Absolutely. I want to quickly pivot to Luis here. I think Luis is- Sure. Eagerly waiting to answer. Might be on the NVM side. You obviously announced one couple of engagements there. How do you see that pipeline growing on the NVM side? Maybe give us some broad strokes on how these are structured. Obviously, supply is tight. Everybody's trying to get on the NVM, sort of this LTA thing. maybe you can tell us, how do you see that mix of- Totally. Proportion of revenues going out as you- Totally. When we closed the quarter, we said we had signed five deals. Right? we're very happy about that. we talked about the financial profile of those deals. as I just mentioned, it's a win-win relationship with our customers. Yeah. They are great. They're coming back, and we're in constant negotiations with them. As I also mentioned last quarter, there are several conversations going on, and they're progressing well. Yeah. We're talking to customers across all segments, right? From data centers to edge customers. Obviously, our consumer business is more transactional- Yeah. It doesn't really apply there. But we're talking to all other customers, and as long as we're willing to operate in this new business model, we're open for business. Got it. I want to ask you a slightly tougher question. You have BiCS coming. It's 300+ layer. Right. Is what's out there. Things are tight now. It's great. at some point, you're adding CapEx. You have to add CapEx. You'll add CapEx. Industry adds CapEx. How do you decide on that CapEx roadmap? You have a partner, Kioxia. You have other peers in the industry. How do you think through that dynamic of how you add capacity? How much do you add capacity? Yeah. I would start by saying we're adding capacity all the time. Right. We're growing capacity in the mid to high teens, right? That's what we've said. we're investing. Yeah. You see that in our financials. We've also said that we made the most cost-efficient transition of the BiCS transition so far. Yeah. Next year, we're going to be continuing that transition to BiCS 8, and then we're going to start building some capacity for BiCS 10. It will be a little bit more expensive per bit, right? same growth, but a little bit more higher cost. it would still be lower percentage of revenue, obviously, as our prices have continued to go up. What we do is we take a long-term view of the market. Now we talk to our customers, we understand where that growth is, and that's where we're planning to. We can't react to a one quarter of what happening today, right? Yeah. It takes 110 days to produce a wafer. we really take a long-term view, and we want to make sure that we're there to source profitable and sustainable bits. Got it. One last question. I got a minute here. your earnings for next year consensus is close to $200 earnings per share. That's a massive cash flow. What are you going to do with all that cash? Yeah, I think that's an easy question. We've been very consistent on that. Number one, we need to invest in the business. Right. The CapEx that's required, we need to continue to fund the business. We've made some strategic investments to strengthen our supply chain. Yeah. We invested in Nanya to get more access to DRAM, which is very important to us, particularly as we expand into data center, which consumes more DRAM. We extended the JV agreement for another few years, so that's great investments in the business. We said we wanted to pay down our debt, so we started with $2 billion. That's all gone. Yeah. The third thing to do, which is really the role of our company, is to return cash to our shareholders. We announced a $6 billion share buyback program with earnings. As you can imagine, we should be executing on that, and we will give you an update at the end of the quarter and then what's next. Great. What a fantastic story, guys. Thank you. Any last questions? One last question? No? Done? Gone? Gone. Done. That's it. 12 hour, guys. Fantastic. Appreciate it