Astera Labs, Inc. (ALAB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Joe Moore from Morgan Stanley semiconductor research. And very happy today to have the management team of Astera Labs, Jitendra Mohan, CEO; and Mike Tate, CFO. Thank you guys for being here.

Maybe we could just start out with just a general view of AI. I think the market -- I think the investors realize that 2026 is very strong, but there's a lot of questioning about duration of that strength into '27 and beyond. It seems like everyone in the industry is kind of worried about supply for the next 4 years. Everybody in Wall Street is worried about next year fading. Can you just talk about generally what you see from the AI ecosystem?

Just like we were talking about backstage, it seems like sky is always falling for one reason or another. But I think the worries are a bit exaggerated. I really think, just again, from a layman consumer standpoint, we are still in very early innings of AI. We use AI internally in the company for some of the work that we do and the potential for using AI is just immense. So I think -- and you can also see this from the CapEx investment decisions that some of the bigger hyperscalers are making. And specifically, as it pertains to a Astera Labs, there is still a lot of growth that we have ahead of us, whichever direction the market is going. So I do think that if you look back 5 years from now, 10 years from now, we'll be in a much bigger installations of AI and so on. Will that ride be all linear? I don't know. But I think the goal that we have as a company is to always do better than what the market is doing. If the tide is lifting, we want to rise higher, faster. And if it's going in the other direction, we still want to beat the market.

Great. That's helpful. So maybe we could walk through some of the products and what you're seeing there. The company came public on the back of 3 different product portfolios and you've added more since then. So maybe start to start chronologically. But Aries, the retimer business grew 70% last year. Can you help us think about the forward content opportunities that's kind of signal integrity seems to be a critical issue.

Yes, absolutely. And this is what we have said, as these systems become more complex, the data rates become higher, it's just difficult for the signal to go from one point to the other. So the amount of single conditioning that you need will continue to increase. So the retimers are not going to go away so long as we have higher data rates, more complex system and copper from a media choice. And that's what we see happened last year. Our single conditioning portfolio, Aries, in particular, grew 70% year-on-year. We expect it to continue to grow this year as well and then out in the future. So that growth is really coming on the strength of also the deployment of this portfolio, not only in scale-out, which is when we went public 2 years ago, majority of the revenue was scaled out. Now we also participate in scale-up with these PCIe retimers, both on a chip-down stand opportunities where you're driving a backplane or a front foot as well as active electrical cables. So it's been a great ride so far, and we continue to see this portfolio growth.

And can you talk about the competitive dynamics? You were first mover in PCIe Gen 5 retimers. There's been a number of competitive announcements since then, but it seems like you've still done a very good job holding market share. Can you talk about that? And then also your progress on Gen 6?

Yes. Actually, interestingly, we were the fourth company to have PCIe retimers when we first launched them. But we won because of the architecture that we chose, which is based on a software-first approach. And then we have our COSMOS software that we use to optimize, customize these solutions as well as get diagnostics information that our customers then use in their own operating stack. On the back of that, we actually became the dominant supplier for PCI Express Gen 4 and Gen 5. And then we started the PCIe Gen 6 journey in March of '24, actually right coincident with us, our IPO debut, where we first introduced Gen 6 retimer. But at the time, we said, look, we are the first one out of the gate, but remains to be seen what happens. Since that time, actually, we have done quite well. We are probably the only company that is shipping PCIe Gen 6 retimer solutions in volume. Over these 2 years, we have learned a lot, and we have incorporated those learnings into our COSMOS software that makes our solutions stronger. But I would also say that more and more, it's not about having a point solution. It's great that you have a retimer, and I'm sure over time, it's a big market. Other companies will be successful with their retiming solutions. But we have retimers. We have electrical cables, we have gearboxes and we have switches. So we have a full PCI Express portfolio, and this is what customers look for when they are trying to pick a vendor for their PCIe solution needs.

Great. And then last quarter, your fastest-growing portfolio was Taurus, which is the active electrical cables, which is not a market where you were the leader coming in, but you've done very well. Can you talk about that opportunity?

Yes, we're very excited about the progress we're making with Taurus. We started shipping Taurus in the second half of 2024 for 200-gig switches. And then just recently, we started ramping the 400-gig switches. And like you mentioned, it was our #1 grower in Q4. These 400-gig switches are still building momentum, so they will provide growth in 2026. And then we're starting to now bring our 800-gig switch solutions into the market. And this is -- for the first time, we're going to diversify beyond our largest customer, so that will incrementally give us more growth going into 2027.

Okay. Helpful. And then the third market that you came public was Leo, the CXL business, a little bit more nascent, I think, but can you talk about that opportunity as well?

If I planned better, I would have punted this question to Mike. So Leo is our third product family. Clearly, it has not met the expectations that we had for growth for a variety of reasons, both the availability of CXL capable CPUs, as well as all of the investment dollars going into AI. Having said that, we are actually -- it's looking quite good for the family in general, with our lead customer qualifying this for data center applications. So a CXL-based server instance is now available in private beta on Azure Cloud. And as this use case diversifies, we expect other hyperscalers to follow suit as well. So general purpose compute will be the first deployment of CXL, and it will happen later this year and continue to ramp into 2027. We are also excited about the applications of CXL and AI. So there are some of the smaller AI platforms that are both exploring and actually, we have some design-ins for KV Cache-type applications for CXL. So those are still being explored, are not meaningful enough to comment in terms of a 2026 revenue ramp. But as these become more commonplace, we'll give more signposts for '27 and beyond.

Okay. I mean that's kind of new, right? It's been the general purpose technology primarily, yes. Okay. And then you've talked about the Switch family, which you introduced after the IPO, Scorpio being the biggest market that you address. And I know there's different P-Series, X-Series, we can talk about both. Can you talk generally about why you're so enthusiastic about switching?

Yes. So the switch product happens to be an anchor socket when it comes to designing an AI system. So clearly, if you look at our hyperscaler customers, they will start with the XPU. And with the XPU, they have two choices. For scale-out, it is almost always PCI Express base. So this is an application that is service our Scorpio P-Series family. And then they have a choice to make for their scale-up as well and scale up when they use PCI Express-based protocols, that is service by our Scorpio X family. So both of these are very large TAMs. We anticipate Scorpio P to be about $4 billion of TAM over time. And we have great traction. It is -- Scorpio P-Series is the fastest-growing product line in the history of the company. We introduced this in Q2 or started generating revenue in Q2 of last year. And just in 3 quarters, it's already crossed 10% of our revenue. So we're very excited about that. We also announced two additional hyperscalers, U.S.-based hyperscalers that have designed this in and is going through qualification with revenue ramps happening next year. So that continues to be a very exciting application. We're also actually even more excited about the Scorpio X family, which is applicable for scale-up, and scale-up just happens to be a lot richer application with a lot of links and so on. And we anticipate that TAM to be $10 billion with a combination of PCI Express and UALink. We already have a design win in there. So we're very excited about that. It started to ramp in 2026, will continue through the back half of the year. And we have over 10 engagements for Scorpio X family that we announced a couple of quarters back, and now it's grown even more than that. So we fully anticipate having multiple customers designed in for Scorpio X family by the end of the year.

Okay. Great. For the scale-out for Scorpio P, how pervasive will that be? Is that multiple platforms? Should we think of it as NVIDIA-centric, ASIC-centric? How do we look at that?

Yes. So Scorpio P-Series, the P stands for PCI Express. So PCI Express is very widely applicable. In fact, PCI Express makes the nervous system of all of these AI servers, whether it's compute or network cards or storage they all connect to each other over PCI Express. So Scorpio P-Series has wide applicability. And as we mentioned, we started with a Grace Blackwell-based deployment when customers wanted a customized deployment of Grace Blackwell, they chose to go with Scorpio P-Series. A similar application is we are seeing with other hyperscaler customers as well. And the reason for that is very simple. When we designed the Scorpio P-Series, it was a design that was in grounds-up for AI applications. It was optimized to deliver the performance that is needed for AI applications to understand the AI workloads and the AI traffic. So it's a very purpose-built device and the customers like it for that reason.

Okay. And then with scale up, really big opportunity completely greenfield. And I feel like we've sort of -- we went like 2 weeks from talking about that to talking about how competitive it's going to be and who's going to win what. It seems like a lot of opportunity. I think most people know who your lead customer is there, a pretty exciting one. But you've also talked about these 10 additional engagements. How big is that opportunity for scale up for you over time?

I think over time, Scorpio X will probably be our largest product family just because it is the fastest-growing product family, and it is the largest TAM. We have 10-plus customers. These are made up of hyperscalers, AI platform providers, both in the U.S. as well as overseas. So there is just insane amount of traction that we are seeing a lot of customers actively designing in, some have designed in and are ramping as we just talked about. Others will continue this ramp later part of this year. And then we are also excited about the duration of this ramp. So some of these designs just go into production in 2027 and will continue to ramp through 2028. So a very long legs before the industry and some of these customers transition from PCI Express to UALink.

Maybe you could talk about that transition. And just there are a lot of standards here where we were talking about NVLink, NVLink Fusion, PCI Express, UALink, Ethernet, ESUN, there's a lot of different directions this can go. Can you talk about your ability to attack those opportunities?

Yes. Just maybe just to kind of lay out the land. There are, I would say, three different protocols that customers are using. First camp would be a proprietary camp, which is things like NVIDIA's NVLink, for example. Second one would be PCI Express and UALink and I'll tell you why they are in the same camp. And third would be Ethernet and all the different variants of Ethernet. Largely, what we have found is customers are in one of two camps, either they are using what is called a memory-centric protocol, NVLink, PCI Express, UALink are examples of that, or they're using an Ethernet-centric protocol. And what we have learned now is that customers are going to stay in the swim lanes that they are in, not because of anything other than the fact that their software stacks are completely tuned for a particular protocol. So if you look at what our plays is in each one of these, NVLink Fusion until recently was proprietary, we really did not have any play in it, nobody did. But with the advent of NVLink Fusion which was announced May of last year, and we recently announced a participation in that with one of the lead hyperscalers. Now we do have some presence within NVLink Fusion. PCI Express and then as the transition to UALink, is really our bread and butter. UALink, in particular, was purpose-built for scale up. It is just designed for optimizing for traffic that's required to connect GPUs together. A lot of interest in UALink. And certainly, we will participate in that just as fully as we are participating in PCI Express with a complete portfolio of signal conditioning devices, switches and so on. And then Ethernet, the customers that have optimized their software for Ethernet, they are going to stay with Ethernet. They are not moving either. And our participation there would be with our scale-out devices, both on the Scorpio P-Series as well as the Taurus retimers.

Okay. That's helpful. And then why would you characterize UALink similarly to PCI Express as memory-centric versus -- yes, I thought there was more of an Ethernet kind of basis for some of the UALink.

Yes. So there are two things. One is the protocol and the other one is the signaling layer. So now what has happened is all the signaling layer has become the same, whether it's NVLink or Ethernet or UALink, they all use 200-gigabit SerDes and 200-gigabit physical layer from Ethernet. So from that standpoint, they're all the same. The difference really comes from the protocol. UALink was built ground up for scale-up protocols. So understand that there is GPU sending data to another GPU, trying to do all reduce operations or other AI-specific operations. Whereas Ethernet was designed as a message passing protocol. So you need to run some additional things on top of base Ethernet, which adds to more latency or reduced throughput. The other very important factor between UALink, for example, and Ethernet is UALink is a completely open standard. It is a greenfield deployment, Astera wants to participate in it. Other start-ups will participate. Other public companies will participate. And as a result, you end up with a nice vibrant ecosystem for our customers to choose from. And that is something that is very important for our customers. On the other end, proprietary standards are indeed proprietary. Even if you look at Ethernet, which is a nice public standard once you start adding these other protocols on top of it. And because of the dominance of one player in that industry, it starts to again look a little bit not quite an even playing field. So our customers are telling us to focus on PCI Express and UALink. So that's what we are doing. At some point in time, when we have that opportunity addressed and our customers ask us to do other protocols, we are always open for that.

And I guess, can you talk about the UALink opportunity? There's been AMD is using UALink, but it's sort of funneled through Ethernet. You've had Amazon talk about UALink and Trainium4, but also NVLink Fusion in Trainium4, so there's some confusion there. It seems like there's a pretty good future for UALink, but can you talk about where we're going with that standard?

Yes, yes, absolutely. I think UALink has a bright future. When we look at the overall scale-up TAM, we estimated that to be about $20 billion in 2030. And then again, our estimate is that it's split pretty evenly between UALink and Ethernet. And so you don't have to convince everybody to go UALink. As a matter of fact, we do think that all of these different protocols will coexist. And we have a strong enough opportunity. Almost half of that's a $10 billion TAM to address just for UALink alone. And so we are absolutely focused on that. And then once we have solved that problem, then we look at the other $10 billion that's open.

And then your involvement in NVLink Fusion is pretty interesting. NVLink within the NVIDIA platform is their technology, what is the role that you can play in NVLink Fusion?

Yes, that's -- it's a great development where previously, as I mentioned, NVLink was a closed ecosystem to NVIDIA. NVIDIA build NVSwitches, and their GPU stock to NVSwitches directly. There is an interest from the industry to use NVL72 infrastructure, not just the switches, but the whole rack with be liquid cooling and all the nuts and bolts and power components that go along with it. The problem is none of the other external to NVIDIA XPUs stop NVLink. So NVLink Fusion allows external XPUs, ASICs to talk to an NVIDIA ecosystem. And the way this is done is to use a chip that translates the native protocol of the ASIC or of the XPU and translates that into NVLink, so that you can then talk to NVSwitch. I think it's very important to note that NVIDIA trusted Astera and as did the hyperscalers, to sort of open up the innards of both sides of the protocol to build this chip. And this chip gets attached, one is to one with every XPU. So as a result, if you look at the content that Astera has on a, call it a hybrid rack, where you have an XPU talking to NVSwitches or a native rack, where you have an XPU talking directly to a native switch, is about the same for us. So we are just very happy to participate in both NVLink Fusion ecosystem as well as PCI Express or UALink.

Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. So the [indiscernible] version of all this is a $20 billion TAM that you see emerging in 5 years, completely greenfield, you think at least half of it is accessible to you?

Half of it is accessible to us on the products that we are building today. We have the capability to address the other half as well, and we will do so as our customers ask us to do.

Okay. Great. Maybe we could shift a little bit and talk about optical. Most of your technology is based on copper, scale up today is entirely based on copper, but a lot of focus on the move to optical. Can you talk about that and your role in optical going forward?

Yes, absolutely. So I think you have to, first of all, look at the portfolio, not as copper versus optical. There is a core functionality that we need to deliver as part of the controllers or as part of the fabric switches, which might be memory control technology or it might be the ability to switch packets and so on. The choice of copper versus optical is a media choice. And so the products that we have today that are available for copper, over time, we will offer them in optical flavors as well. So for example, if you look at our Scorpio X family, today, it supports only copper as a media or the interconnect choice. And if you are able to reach to your endpoint, which is an XPU directly on copper or through a retimer or cables, et cetera, that's what you will do. Our customers absolutely want to use copper for as long as possible and as much as possible, simply because it is the most reliable, it is the cheapest and it's the lowest power technology. However, as these clusters scale and data rates go up and you need to connect multiple racks, you do need to go to optical. And we intend to fully participate in this optical opportunity that is in front of us. And we've been working on optical for optical technology for a long while actually. We just announced it gained more momentum in this last earnings because of the acquisition that we have done of an optical company. And our play in the optical space will start with an optically-enabled Scorpio switch. So just like we have the switching technology coming up with copper, it will be available in optics. The way to do that is to design an optical engine and marry it with the switch. That's where we will start. But that is not the full solution, right? So now the switch can talk optics, but you need something on the other side as well. So this is where we also will have our optical engine available to attach to the XPU. So that becomes a second kind of product in the road map. And last but not the least, it turns out the technology that we got through the acquisition of Xscale, a glass connector, is actually a really key piece of the overall optical engine puzzle so much so that our customers are quite interested in just buying that. And so we will offer that also as a component sale.

Okay. And you've talked about this being a much larger potential opportunity when it migrates to optical, we've heard some really big numbers in terms of optical content of those scale-up systems down the road. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes. So I think there are two things. One is very easy to see, which is just that typically, if you are making a copper link, there may be no retimers in that link at all, if you can avoid it. And even if you do have to add one, you might add one retimer in the midst. So when you go to optical, you have to have a minimum of two, because one converts electrical to optical, near the switch, let's say, and another one converts the optical back to electrical, near the XPU. So already you have double the attach. And the ASP of each one of these is an order of magnitude higher than what you would get, let's say, for a retimer class device. So we look at it as a huge opportunity. If magically all of our retimers were to convert to optical, that will be a wonderful opportunity. But at the same time, this is also the challenge for our customers. Somebody has to pay for all of this ASP increase and the attach rate increase. And that is the reason that our customers want to stay with copper for as much as possible.

Makes sense. You did an acquisition, a smaller company, aiXscale Photonics, what is the state of your optical be? Do you need to invest a lot to have these capabilities? Do you need more acquisitions? How do we think about that?

So maybe if I were to just sell lay out the optical engine for the audience here. Optical engine consists of three pieces. The first one is an electrical IC, and we started investing in this foundational technology that will lead to electrical ICs way back. So it's not a decision that we took yesterday or the day before. That's on one side. So this electrical IC is what talks to the switch or what talks to the XPU. This electrical IC then drives silicon photonics. I'll come back to silicon photonics in a second. Silicon photonics is also a wafer-level technology. At the other side of the silicon photonics wafer, which converts electrical into optical is a glass connector. This glass connector is used to gather up all the photons and then launch them into a fiber. So this is the technology that we got through the Xscale acquisition. And we focused on this because we really believe that the bottleneck to deploying optical at scale for scale-up is really this connector piece, because everything else is a wafer-level technology. TSMC and others have been producing these wafers by the bushel. Same is true for silicon photonics as well. But putting it all together and doing optical alignment and glue and so on, that is really, really tricky to ensure reliability of these links. And that's also a technology that would be hard honestly, for us to develop internally, which is why we made the acquisition. And just with complete hindsight, it was a great acquisition. Coming back to the silicon photonics. So this is the third piece, and it's in many ways, very religious choice, from our customers. Some customers absolutely want to go down a particular path because that's what they believe in. Other customers are more open. They might want to have a backup solution or a primary solution and so on. So our strategy is not to get ourselves pigeonholed into one technology, but to leave this optionality open for as long as possible, both to service multiple customers and also if a customer were to do an about turn that we'll be able to address that. So we will offer Astera Labs silicon photonics, a choice of modulators and fabs and so on. But if a customer insists that, hey, you must use this other silicon photonic solutions, then we are certainly open to that as well. The philosophy at Astera has always been to support the customer with whichever choice that they have made as opposed to forcing our choice on our customers. And so far, we are getting very good reception from our customers. We are engaged with the requirements that they have. We understand the time lines that they want us to intercept and we are more than capable of intercepting those time lines.

Okay. Great. So maybe shift to talk about the financials a little bit. You've had really good growth even before the Scorpio X really starts to ramp in the second half. You guided to a good March, and it seems like you've got strong growth. Can you talk about what's kind of bridging you into that ramp in the second half?

Yes. We're seeing growth from all our product lines, Aries, Taurus and Scorpio particularly right now. For Scorpio, we launched P first, so the P-Series grew in 3 short quarters to be 15% of our revenues. And as we make it through 2026, we're going to add two new U.S. hyperscalers to that mix. So we have a very good line of sight of growth into 2027. Scorpio X is a much bigger segment of the switching market. We just started shipping initial volumes in Q4 and go to the higher volumes in Q1 and Q2. But the way it's working out, it will be a much more material ramp in Q3 and Q4 as well. Ultimately, Scorpio X, given the size of that opportunity, it will cross over P and Scorpio in total will be our biggest product line in short order.

Okay. That's helpful. Gross margin, you've talked about some mix-related pressure there. You also have some issues around the warrant. Can you maybe talk about.

Yes. As we broaden our product portfolio, we're going to see a wider range of gross margins. When we went public, 90% of our revenue was coming from Aries as a discrete semiconductor device. And now on both Aries and Taurus, we also -- we sell modules. So we do hardware. So we take our retimer device and put it on a PCB board with passives and other hardware componentry. So it's hard to mark up the ASPs as high and get the margins to the level of the discrete semiconductor devices. So those are ramping as a percentage of our revenues. Also, with the Scorpio family, we will also see a wider range of margins depending on the use case on the number of lanes the device uses. So there will be applications where the device will have more lanes and the customers using in the device. So those will be a bit lower than corporate average. And then lastly, the Amazon warrant that we have, and we've had one in the past, you take the value of the warrants that vest and you hit it against revenue, which is dollar-for-dollar impact to gross margins, which we're estimating to be about 200 basis point hit starting in Q2.

Okay. Helpful. And then last quarter, you had significant revenue upside, but also there was a big step-up in R&D associated with that. How should we think about that? Obviously, there's a lot of things that you can invest in, if you're able to continue to put upside in revenue, will we see the R&D line come up along with that? Or just how do you think about that?

Yes. I'd say, right now, we're not optimizing to the operating margin. We're optimizing to seize the moment with the TAM that's in front of us. So I would say we've underinvested last year, and we've had an opportunity with these last two acquisitions that we did, one was a technology acquisition, and one was more of an acquihire. If we find those opportunities, we will take advantage of those. There's just so much opportunities in front of us. But that being said, even though we will continue to invest significantly in R&D, the revenue opportunities are very sizable. And we do expect to continue to have operating margin leverage from this new level that we're at right now. And our model is to deliver 40% operating margins, and we think we'll track back to that depending on revenue growth versus the level of R&D investment we're making.

Yes. Okay. We certainly developed a very strong track record as a public company when it comes to numbers. So congratulations on that. Customer concentration, it sort of comes with the territory when you are in these markets, selling to hyperscalers. How do you think about that? And how -- to the extent that your biggest customer is getting pretty big, how do you think about diversification opportunities away from that?

Yes. I mean we're focused on the data center. So it's a natural occupational hazard to have customer concentration. Our lead customer is the most aggressive in adopting our technologies first. So they were the first to adopt the Taurus and the first to adopt Scorpio. That being said, we're seeing a nice diversification path for Taurus and Scorpio beyond our lead customer. We talked about 800-gig Taurus. Now we'll broaden it out beyond our lead customer. And then with Scorpio, we have two new U.S. hyperscalers, and we have over 10 scale-up customers. So we see a path to see very good diversification. But it doesn't mean our lead customer is not going to grow. They're going to grow significantly. So...

Yes, it's hard to outgrow them in too fast. It's an important aspect of your business is the relationship with hyperscalers and the trust that they have to develop products for them and things like that, something that was notable even before the IPO that you had those relationships. Where does that come from? Where does that faith come from? And does that open up a lot of opportunities for you guys?

Yes. I would say that's actually one of the greatest strengths that we have as a company. And this started way back, I think just when we were getting started. We made a prediction of the type of components that the industry and our customers will use. And I don't know how much they trusted us at that time, but they say, yes, go ahead, build what you want to build. We built it, and it turned out that they really needed it, and we had the perfect solution when they needed it. And so that was really a start of a great relationship where we have listened to our customers, we've understood what it is they want to do, and then we have consistently delivered. So this combination of moving along at the same pace at which our customers want us to move and be very consistent in our delivery track record has earned a trusted adviser position with our customers. And so now what happens is we get involved with them 2 or 3 years before they actually need the product because that's how far they plan their deployments in advance. And a lot of things have to come together. And we get a seat at the table to understand that. And especially now with the Scorpio class devices that, by the way, we engaged like more than 2 years ago with our both the lead customer as well as the AI platform provider. We get just such a good view into what their road map is and what products we need to build. And extremely importantly, what we don't need to build and what features we don't need to put into our own products. So that is a fantastic advantage that we have. And this is really what has led us to add the number of product families that we have added to the company. We now have four. And certainly, we are working very hard to introduce more product family into the industry, all based on customer feedback.

That's very helpful. Let me pause there and see if we have questions from the audience. One up here. Will you wait for the mic.

I have two questions. The first one is for the CXL solution. So you said that there is some market traction for this product. I mean like for the customer using it, it's more used for the standard product or they need to do the customization for each customer. So this is the first question for the CXL. The second question is, you talked about right now, Astera want to be a full stack solution for the optical engines. So I mean for this product, it will be only used for the pluggable optics or it can also be used for the CPO, which are major trend right now?

Very good. So let me address the first question first, which is how do we customize our solutions for our customers and specifically for the CXL product family that we have. So there's nothing special about the CXL product family in the sense that it is a standard product that can be used by multiple customers. But just like we do with our other products, there are a lot of software hooks inside of this product. So if a customer wants to use a particular type of memory or a particular combination of the DRAM itself and the power regulators and whatever else, we can do that. More importantly, if our hyperscaler customers want a certain amount of qualification criteria or serviceability, reliability features when it comes to memory, we can customize it for them. And so our strategy has always been not to spin silicon based on different customer needs, but to customize it based on the COSMOS software that we have. And once we have done this customization for the customer and they incorporate it into their own software stack, it becomes a very sticky solution. So that's your first question. The second question was the optical engine that we are talking about, is it for pluggable or for CPO? Actually, we are targeting the scale-up optics first. And scale-up optics will rely on either an NPO, near-package optics or CPO, co-package optics, and that's what we are targeting first. Pluggable optics has been a domain of scale out. And while it's a big market, there already are a couple of large players in that space. So we are not targeting it just yet. But at the right time, we will go after that opportunity as well.

Question up here.

As you move customers through 800 gigabits and towards 1.6 terabits, at what point do the -- does the architecture for this copper become the constraint? And when you hit that wall, is the answer going to be more conditioning? Or do you see a genuine pull from your customers towards optical?

Yes, there is not a kind of a proverbial wall that one day, everything is copper and the next day it all becomes optical. Optical is already widely deployed in the data center. All of the long links that are today running 100-gigabit per second and transitioning to 200 are already optical. But it is largely deployed in scale out. When it comes to scale up, the density of these connections is so large that are traditional pluggable optics does not work. And so our customers want to stay with copper for as long as possible. Specifically to your point, at 200-gigabit per second, we believe that all the connections within the rack level will continue to be copper. There is no need to go to optical. Copper is the most reliable, cheapest and the least power solution that you can have. Now once you start to increase the domain or cluster size from one rack to multiple racks, what might happen is within the rack, continue to stay copper, but the rack-to-rack interconnect, which can span several meters may have to go to optical. So we believe that's where the first intercept will happen for optical. And eventually, when the data rates are even higher or you've solved all the cost and reliability issues with optical then you can have a pure optical deployment, which is optical both within the rack as well as across the rack. But I think that day is still far.

Have those decisions have been made when you talk about optical scale-up still several years away. People -- there's a lot of start-ups saying, we have this business, we have that business. It seems like all of that is still kind of speculative at this point.

I would not say it's speculative, but the hard decisions have not been made. Simply because nobody has demonstrated deploying CPO at scale. And showing 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 units is one thing, but having these things deployed in the millions such that they do not fail is a very difficult problem for the industry to solve. So we must all together solve the reliability problem, and then we must also solve the cost problem. At a minimum, these two must be solved, and we are working on our solutions. And as we discussed, we want to have a flexible approach so that if course corrections are needed, we are able to make them.

Great. Well, that brings us to the end of our time. Jitendra, Mike, thanks so much for the time.

Thank you.

Thank you.