GlobalFoundries Inc. (GFS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
December 2, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsOkay. We're going to get started. So I'm Tim Arcuri. I'm the semi equipment analyst here at UBS. Very pleased to have Tim Breen, who's the CEO of GlobalFoundries and Sam Franklin, who is the CFO of GlobalFoundries. So thank you to you both.
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesIt's great to be here.
Sam Franklin
ExecutivesThank you.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsSo let's just talk about the demand environment. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the current demand environment. How differently have the end markets played out over the past few quarters? And are you seeing anything differently than you mentioned in your earnings call? You said handsets were softer, autos and data center stronger.
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesYes. I think we should separate -- thanks for having us here. I think we should separate a little bit the dynamics for us, particularly versus overall market backdrop. I think what we're seeing is, remember, after a pretty unprecedented '22, early '23, you've seen for sure, across broader markets, let's leave the data center side for a second. You've seen kind of inventory digestion, a general level of macro weakness. I think as we come through '25, it has slowly improved. Those -- what were headwinds are becoming, let's say, balanced to tailwinds. You see inventories coming down consistently quarter-on-quarter. You see general consumer sentiment better, and you start to see a little bit of green shoots around new product launches and so on, definitely on the handset side. So I'd say, if anything, versus a year ago versus a quarter ago, better overall market demand. I think the one pocket from a market point of view that clearly everyone is talking about data center remains really strong. Lots of speculation about how long that will go on for. Our conviction is we're very much at the beginning of that build-out phase. There'll be some puts and takes and bumps along the road, but overall, that has a lot more to give. But overall, very strong now and pulling for sure on a lot of content for us. I think there are markets for us where maybe the market isn't as strong, but our share story has been quite strong. And auto has been a good example of that where we've been gaining from a de minimis business -- went public through to now quite a large business for us, approaching $1.5 billion this year. It's been a double-digit growth even in a pretty flat market. That's just a story of good execution, good patience and progression over time.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. Let's just talk about the geopolitical environment. You would seem to be well positioned amid the geopolitical uncertainty. Your business hasn't really recovered that much. How much of a tailwind do you think the geopolitical situation is for you? And how do you expect tariffs to impact mature nodes for the foundry industry?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesSo I think this journey is actually one that has intensified, but didn't just start very recently. And so we've seen a trend of people being concerned about sourcing individual RISC-V items. That was, for sure, exacerbated and made real during the pandemic. But I think you've really only seen this year companies set really clear policies. And so now it's no longer the case that phrases like NCNT, non-China non-Taiwan. That's not a rare thing to hear in a supplier conversation. It's the default in most supplier conversations where if they haven't asked for it before, they're asking for a non-China non-Taiwan supply chain, by the way, either because they themselves are doing it or because their customers are asking for that. I think some markets led the way, automotive being a prime example, led the way to set that up earlier. But I think all markets now have some version of that embedded in their sourcing strategies. And so that's leg 1 of pulling content to the likes of us and so on. But then leg 2 is U.S. specifically. And so now you also see U.S. sourcing as not a nice-to-have criteria, but a must-have criteria in new platform decisions and so on. And I think -- so longer term, very, very strong tailwind for us. We believe that will contribute to meaningful share gains in the next kind of, let's say, 5 to 10 years of the industry. I don't think of that as a short-term phenomenon that comes and goes, but more about secular share gain. It is not a panic buying decision, right? And it's not driven by short-term policy that's going to unwind in a short period of time.
Sam Franklin
ExecutivesAnd just to add one comment to that as well. I mean, look, independent of everything that's been happening from a geopolitical point of view over the course of the last year, we actually made very strategic decisions in the 2023 time frame to actually start diversifying our footprint to provide even more diversity for our customers as well. Our multi fab is becoming a great example for that. If you rewind to when Malta was first put in place, it was largely a FinFET fab. We've taken the decision now to migrate in technologies on our 22FDX, our 28-nanometer, our 40-nanometer. And that's going to serve all of those end markets that we have today as well as silicon photonics, which has already served out Malta. So notwithstanding those geopolitical dynamics, we've been driving towards creating this capacity, this fungibility and this optionality for our customers for quite some time.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsSo I guess, Tim, back to your point, so your point is really that the geopolitical tailwinds that you're going to see really are only now starting that they're still out in front of you.
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesI think they're very much accelerating now. And so I think you see companies very publicly stating their strategy. And we have 8 significant buyers of semiconductors we announced earlier this year when we announced our U.S. plans. We had another 4 or 5 when we announced our European plans. And I think when you see some of the largest companies in the world, some of the best supply chain managers in the world commit to a, like I say, non-China, non-Taiwan or a U.S. sourcing strategy, you can start to take it very seriously. And I think like I said, that's a good tailwind for us.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsCan I ask you about your sole-source mix? I think on the earnings call, you mentioned 90% of design wins are -- over the past 4 quarters are sole sourced to you. And it's been that way now for some time actually. Yet when you report your revenue, it's 2/3 of the revenue is sole sourced. So -- and that hasn't changed much in the last 3 years. So you're winning way more than what you're reporting as revenue that's sole sourced. Is that just because of the time it takes for these designs to start to become revenue?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesI think it's very relevant to the diversification we've gone through, right? And if you think about markets like auto, which we've been very focused on, auto is notorious for a very long design cycle, but also a very long production cycle, right? And so I think we've been winning more in slower to ramp markets, perhaps not winning quite as much in shorter cycle more, let's say, dual source type markets like mobile, and that really plays through in our revenue mix this year. And so I think as you start to see kind of those stabilize, but also the wins come through in things like auto, that mix of the overall revenue should increase as well.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsAnd is there a way to think about like -- I mean, this is sort of a generic question, but is there a way to think about the margin for a sole-source piece of business versus a dual source piece of business? How much of a tailwind can that be as more of your revenue shifts over to sole source?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesSo I think there are lots of different drivers of mix shift impacting margins. For sure, the sourcing strategy. If you're getting awarding on a sole-source basis, it means the customer went first question, does this technology enable me to win in my market? Can I do something different that I couldn't do elsewhere? By the way, they look at the sourcing location. Now again, another factor, can I make this in one or more locations. And to Sam's point earlier, having actually optionality of saying, I can make this automotive MCU with high-performing embedded memory, I can make it in Singapore, [indiscernible] and the U.S. That's a pretty good value proposition. We've seen them willing to pay a premium for that. And so I'd say, yes, when you win on that basis, you typically are winning at higher ASPs than you might win on a dual source piece of business and so on for sure. And as that mix plays through the system, you obviously see an accretive kind of dynamic on our margins.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. Let's talk about some of your segments. So in handsets, you recently called out having made some pricing concessions for some longer-term share gains. Have we seen the positive impact yet from the share gain? Or have we just seen the negative impact from the pricing and that's still out in front of you?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesI think when you look at ASP, you've seen that the ASPs change as a result of that, and we got some questions on that in our last earnings call. And I think like we said, it was our initiation. It wasn't something that was done to us. It's something we actually chose to do because we said, look, as a business with a certain number of capacity corridors, what's the optimum structure for the right amount of share in that market, in that socket, not just today, but also longer term. And so I feel on those ones, we've seen both impacts in one go, slight uptick of utilization, but also slightly lower ASPs, but net-net accretive from an overall profitability point of view for the business. But again, very limited to choice customers where we are in that dual source position where doing something like that could actually yield some incremental business that otherwise wouldn't be available.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. And let's talk about auto. So I mean you've seen very strong growth from that vertical over the past few years. How do you see the pace of activity continuing in the coming years based upon the design activity today?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesSo look, auto has been a long-term story for us, and the wins we're seeing today are not things that happened a year ago. They are often things that happened 3, 4, 5 years ago in terms of that momentum. And we positioned ourselves to have a great technology suite for automotive, right? You think about all the things that automotive needs. It needs high-performance microcontrollers. It needs secure imaging. It needs radar, it needs battery management, the whole slew of content. We positioned our portfolio very much against that. We positioned the fabs as automotive-grade qualified. By the way, it's hard to do it in one fab, let them to do it in 5 fabs around the world. So again, we position the portfolio to be really well tailored for automotive. And I think that's playing through now in wins that we're ramping. But actually, the design win activity has probably been, if anything, increasing, right? And I think if any industry got once bitten twice shy memo on supply security, it was auto, right? And so auto has also been a big proponent. And you've seen that in deals we've done even with OEMs like GM who've been a constant kind of partner for how do we bring more stuff to the U.S. and more content in this part of the world. You see all the ingredients to see that secular share gain. If anything, our design win momentum in auto is picking up. It's more diversified, more applications because the content in the car is growing significantly. So even if units sold out of the dealerships are not growing, content is increasing and our portfolio fit for auto is really good. And to foreshadow a little bit, what we'll talk about more and more in quarters to come is we think auto is the prelude to what AI will do in the physical world, right? It's a device operating out there with increasing intelligence, sensing content distributed compute, actuation, motor control, all of those applications and a ton of communication within the vehicle from vehicle to vehicle and into the cloud. And so all areas that will, I think, play out well as automotive becomes autonomous vehicles in different formats, delivery drones, all these kind of applications that need to be mission-critical, safe, all of these things.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. Let's talk about CID coms infrastructure and data center. There's a lot of things going on in that segment. Yes, it's only 10% of revenue, but it's growing more than 30% year-over-year. So it really is adding 3-plus points to your growth each year. And that can add up pretty quickly. So can you just break down the dynamics inside of that segment?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesSo I think there's 3 kind of big blocks we should talk about in that segment for us. Two relates to the data center, one relates to kind of more broader infrastructure, including SATCOM, which we also include there. So data center story, outside the GPU or the XPU in the data center, the 2 big problems are networking and power, right? I think very commonly acknowledged as bottlenecks or challenges to data center performance. We've been very, very focused on networking with silicon photonics, and we can talk more about what that has been for us as a journey to build a technology really probably before it was interesting, right, for the market, but now for sure, showing those inflection points. But solving those critical networking points where copper just can't cut it anymore for scale-out that works now increasingly also for scale up. So we're seeing the first real growth trajectory of that photonics offering. We're augmenting that with inorganic growth, and we can talk more about that as well. But that networking piece, we see that as a very strong secular driver for us. That's a $100 million business last year, $200 million this year, more than $200 million this year, really good growth going into years to come before we add the inorganic component on top of that. And of course, that's the photonics part. But in optical networking, there's also other content like high-performance silicon germanium, some of these other technologies, which we've also invested a lot in that really enable that high-speed connectivity, which is essential for modern AI data centers. So call that Block 1. Block 2, probably earlier in its journey, we start to see the pull-through of data center power being a big area that basically you have a lot of difficulties converting 800 volts to 0.8 volts at the chip. Any loss is a massive loss to the system overall, a massive loss to the economics of the data center. So there'll be a lot of innovation. There's a lot of companies out there doing cool things in power conversion, and we start to play in that space. Some of our recent GaN announcements also play to that space with low-voltage GaN playing a key role in the next 5 to 10 years of data center power and so on. And the last kind of really good growth driver in CID has been SATCOM. And so the proliferation of low earth orbit satellites, this is a new -- completely new form factor from a device point of view. We never had before the option to go to target, buy a device that costs you a few hundred bucks, gives you 100 megabit connectivity, you can put it on your car, on your boat, in your remote cabin, you can put it in a rural area. And that's suddenly a new unaddressable market until recently where you have a massive component of RF content, right? Think of this device as a massive phased array antenna. There's beam forming the sorts of device to steer those RF signals because it's not going to a cell tower 2 miles away, it's going to a low earth orbit satellite 300 miles away, and it needs to do 100-megabit connection, not 1 or 2 megabits that we used to remember from old SATCOM or old flights and so on. So look, these are big growth drivers where you suddenly see an inflection point of content, and we've been working to position the portfolio against that.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsSo you mentioned silicon photonics. Let's actually talk about that. It's tracking to, I think, $100 million this year, but it's expected to reach $1 billion by 2030. How should we think about that as a key driver for your business? It seems like pluggables this year, obviously, but how is your outlook on CPO and how that can help your business?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesSo I think we've spoken a little bit about why the transition is important. And I think if you go across the industry now, there's no more debate about kind of if versus when. There's a question of when for different architectures. Pluggables have become dominant. If you went into an AI data center today, you'll see optical transceivers everywhere, optical pluggable modules everywhere. They're getting more and more sophisticated and more and more efficient. Again, that pulls content for us. That's largely the business of photonics today for us is in the pluggables space. What we've added with the AMF acquisition is also more strength in the pluggable space. But in many ways, the real inflection point comes when you can co-package the optics with the switch ASIC or other components in the rack. That's when you have a lot of improvement to connectivity, you really unleash bandwidth. You deal with issues like beachfront density, literally the space you can have to put connectivity into those devices. Again, copper cannot cut it. Copper generates too much heat. Copper can only take one stream of data at a time, even with advanced kind of retimers -- redrivers. With optics, you can multiplex, so you can have 2 streams, 4 streams, 8 streams, 16 streams in the same fiber. So now you're seeing the real kind of secular drivers of that. For us, we invested in CPO well before, like I said, it was -- it's interesting. It goes back even to the IBM days for GF. So we've been doing a lot of work on device, on material, even on packaging, how do you package this device and how do you do complex things like a detachable fiber connector so that the device can have a connection to a fiber, multiple fibers for a board. But if a fiber breaks, you can replace it rather than have to replace the whole board. So we've systematically worked on cracking a lot of the high-volume manufacturing challenges. And so now we see the real pull-through of that as that CPO co-packaged optics adoption comes through. We've said about 2027 is the big inflection point for that. Our $1 billion is kind of a bottom-up number based on current engagements. I would say, if anything, maybe we're being a little bit conservative as that adoption takes place. But let's get to 500, then we can talk about where the numbers will go.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsSo just on that point, so it would suggest that you're gaining a lot of share. I mean, obviously, it's Tower and you are the 2 big players. Their stock has done very well because of their focused exposure on that market, but you have a good amount of exposure relative to the size of that market. How can you better highlight that business? I mean there's some hot startups, a few of which are here, and these are your customers. Are there capabilities you're missing in that end market that you could go out and acquire? Or is it just riding the wave of the market growing and it becomes a bigger piece of your business and people start to focus on it more?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesI think, look, everything, the market focuses on the next problem, the next inflection point. I think we are seeing that interest now, as you say, when you have these startups with multibillion-dollar valuations and so on, the market is clearly saying and investors are saying that these are real businesses now that we need to take very seriously. And by the way, it's not just because of optical networking and things, it's also things like quantum computing, which also has attracted a lot of investor interest. So I think the market piece is coming. I'm not worried about that. I think what our focus is on organic execution, right, really delivering these ramps. These are high-volume ramps, high-velocity ramps for critical applications. We need to deliver. That's a big part of it. Our customers work closely with us to make that happen. What we have been doing on the inorganic side is saying where can we accelerate through either adding capacity, technology, customer mix. AMF, which we acquired recently, very good fit for our business, different customer mix, right, different and complementary technology. But in Singapore, where we have a great manufacturing operations, so we can integrate very synergetically with our current footprint and adding run rate of $75 million of revenue on a base that -- that's quite meaningful on the base that we have for photonics but with significant growth potential. And a modest acquisition price, around $400 million we've paid for that business. And so relatively accretive for a small acquisition like that. And so we'll do that to build acceleration. But we're also investing, and we announced this also recently in design capabilities to help our customers design faster, get to market quicker, build reference design, something we have a lot of familiarity with other parts of our business so that they can go from concept and architecture to functioning optical engine a lot quicker. And the acquisition we recently made in Egypt is a good example of a team that can do that and has been doing that as well.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. Can we talk about your non-wafer revenue? You saw strong momentum in non-wafer revenue in the third quarter. What's driving that increase in mix and how to think about its contribution to gross margin?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesYes. I think the strategic aspect, and I'll let Sam comment a bit on the kind of the dynamics, the puts and takes. But I think the strategic aspect is we want to add more value to our customers. And so we don't have to define in the industry as we make what people need to make we can provide IP. We can provide know-how, we can do NRE on top of that. We've been doing that for some time, but we can scale it more. And so a good factor that will contribute to that in the future has affected less so so far is things like MIPS. And so we acquired arguably one of the best platforms in RISC-V processor IP, as a means to add value to our customers with an IP type service, but also NRE and potentially also custom silicon in the future. And so you start to see additional sort of service lines that obviously come with a different set of economics. They don't require CapEx to invest to grow revenue, and they also have a different margin structure compared to kind of traditional wafer business. So I think that will over time drive more non-wafer revenue. But I think some of the other aspect of non-wafer, non-wafer by the way, includes things like mask and reticles for new tape-outs. As your business grows and you have more momentum, you have more tape-outs, right? We've had more design wins, we've had more tape-outs. As a result, you have more masks and so on. So I think these are all good leading indicators of future revenue growth as well. Sam, do you want to add?
Sam Franklin
ExecutivesYes, sure. So you asked a question around margin more broadly. And I think what's encouraging is that these strategic initiatives and MIPS is a great example of that, that we've taken over the course of the last year and that we'll continue to look at going forward is really creating those mix benefits, not just from a wafer revenue point of view, but also from a non-wafer revenue perspective as well. So we've, since IPO, been roughly in the ZIP code of, call it, 8% to 12% of revenue being comprised of non-wafer revenue. As you rightly say, Tim, the last quarter, we were at about 12%. Our expectation for the fourth quarter is that we'll be a little closer to 13%. So really starting to get beyond the upper boundaries of where we've trended to be. Now that is really a function of where we're seeing that greater offering to our customers as we're broadening our services, it's mask, it's reticles, it's recurring engineering, nonrecurring engineering activities. It's a great leading indicator for where we think about the growth from our wafer revenue perspective as well. And so we talked briefly on this kind of momentum of design wins and third quarter design wins were up almost 2x from a year ago. That translates into tape-outs, which translates into production revenue as well. So as Tim says, we're broadening that ecosystem offering to our customers. And when you think about non-wafer revenue more broadly, it comes through at quite an accretive margin relative to our overall corporate enterprise targets.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsAnd is there like a rule of thumb where non-wafer revenue usually translates to wafer revenue within 2 years? Like what's the sort of general rule of thumb?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesI think it's market dependent. I think is the unfortunate answer to not make it easier is take automotive, right? The automotive, the sequence between a design win and the tape-out and high-volume ramp because you've got test cycles, you've got reliability cycles can take a couple of years, even sometimes 3 or 4 years. Whereas the mobile product, some of the data center products can go a lot quicker. So I think it really depends. So there's a mix in there as well. I think the bigger point is the overall increase tells you more revenue is coming because one way or another leads to the next step of high-volume manufacturing.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsAnd just on the non-wafer revenue point, you did mention MIPS. MIPS is immaterial, it sounds like in the back half of this year, but it sounds like it could be upwards of $100 million next year in non-wafer revenue. Can you just talk about -- I know you're going to host a webinar, so you're going to probably give us more on that, but -- that event. But can you just talk more about the strategy around MIPS? And obviously, you're trying to recapture more of the design ecosystem with the customers. But like where can this go?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesYes. So I think it's really interesting. You've seen RISC-V have been talked about for many years now, but did it really receive massive adoption in the market, not so far. And the reason has been a few fold. First of all, it took time for the ecosystem to mature and to deepen for a lot of code and so on to be written and tested and validated. But what you also didn't have is you didn't really have too many scaled companies who people can rely on as a partner to build processor IP and deliver that. And so MIPS had actually a lot of good offerings from a technology point of view but they needed a kind of industry, I'd say, broad almost platform agnostic, a company like GF to back them to vouch for them for the longer term as an owner to really see the momentum that customers could use this as a tool because customers mean well we're struggling with the idea of saying, I like RISC-V, I'm not so sure about relying on other providers of IP, but I can't do a full RISC-V design on my own with my internal team to the economics just don't work. So they actually want something like this. And we were really heartened when we did MIPS that actually a lot of engagement from both existing GF customers and new kinds of customers who said, this provides us the sweet spot we need. Now let's do a particular core, a custom project together because you're complementing the skills that we otherwise have. And meanwhile, that ecosystem is deepening even further. And obviously, we can contribute even more to that now with a bigger scale. And so I think you're going to see RISC-V play an increasingly important role. And what preview of what the team will talk about tomorrow is -- we think that's really, really important for that physical AI transition, right? Again, we don't want to build processes that are going to work to be a complementary or competitive to an NVIDIA GPU. We'd love to build distributed compute processor in IP and cores for a robotic arm or for a software-defined vehicle [indiscernible] controller, things like that, that do real-time processing out there in the field in harsh conditions, by the way, aerospace and defense same driver. We see a lot of engagement from customers on this front. And so you've seen -- so since the deal was announced, you've seen customers come to you and say, hey, we were thinking about using MIPS, but we didn't really know about the ecosystem. And so now it's like game on. And great technical engagement, but they really need to build a long-term plan. And not just do they want to use MIPS now, but now it gives us an angle to say -- but listen, GF's process technology can also play a role in the solution. And of course, I think that the symbiotic relationship between the IP and the architecture and the process technology, you can tailor 1 to support the other. And that means the geoprocess technology, particularly FD-SOI, or FDX platform is really doing very well. It can be increasingly tailored for those kind of applications. And so for customers not only do they get good RISC-V IP, but they also get a process technology that's really tailored to exploit all of the benefits of the IP.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. Let me -- I want to ask about gross margin. So earlier this year, you thought you could get to 30% by the end of the calendar year. It isn't happening, but mostly because of a slower recovery in the market. So can you just talk about the levers on gross margin as we enter next year?
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesYes. So I think bigger picture, and I'll let Sam add it to it as well. I mean we're pretty close, by the way, in Q4 based on what we've guided. I think all the factors are contributing in the right direction, perhaps not quite at the pace we expected. As you said, the recovery may be a little bit slower than we thought at the beginning of the year. But all of the tailwinds to gross margin, I think that we've been focusing on are there, right? Accretive product mix, improvement of utilization where we have a footprint today that could probably accommodate a $9 billion top line versus the $7 billion, which is where we are today. And the fall-through of that additional wafer you sell is not at the standard gross margin. It's much, much more accretive because you're adding a lot of fixed cost to do that. So utilization plays a very important role in that. And then, of course, year-on-year, we work on CapEx -- efficient CapEx investments, efficient cost control and cost management. And so I think all those ingredients are in place. If anything, I'd say that we now have other means to even improve further, things like MIPS that come with a different margin structure longer term can also contribute. We're standing by our kind of 40% company goal. That's what we're driving to. Obviously, our goal is to make progress towards that in 2026. We're not going to guide '26 now, but the goal is to make meaningful progress towards that. Do you want to add, Sam?
Sam Franklin
ExecutivesLook, we've spent quite some time talking around the fact that as we continue to remix the business, as we continue to see more diversification come through from revenue and the end markets that we'd expect to come back as a more profitable dollar-for-dollar company. And what's encouraging is that we're starting to see that come through now. So if you look at our third quarter results, $1.688 billion, that was flat on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Margin was up 80 basis points quarter-over-quarter, but actually more pronounced is, although, call it, roughly 3% down year-over-year from a revenue point of view, margin was up about 1.3 points. So we're really starting to see this momentum come through in terms of the quality of the mix shift. If I fast forward to the guidance provided for the fourth quarter, you're right, Tim, midpoint of that range is 28.5%, but the upper end of that was 29.5%. So we're somewhat playing around the edges here in terms of where we expect it to be at the start of the year. But general momentum is what's encouraging for us at this stage. So call that roughly 2.5 points of quarter-on-quarter margin growth on what would be a comparatively to slightly below revenue in the fourth quarter implied guidance. And that's really where, as we think about this over the long term, it's kind of marching towards that continued profit fall-through. And all the reasons that Tim mentioned, the scale dynamics, the mix dynamics, the continued growth within the various end markets, coms infrastructure and data center is a great example, right? In the third quarter a year ago, about 7% of revenue. We're now seeing that in 10% of revenue for the third quarter and continue to expect that to grow. So we're quite encouraged with the momentum we're seeing from the margin fall-through perspective, and we'd expect to continue to see that grow as we go into '26 and beyond for all those reasons we just talked about.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsGreat. Last thing that I wanted to ask was you recently brought up the opportunity for more capital returns next year as the free cash flow has gotten a lot better, which is new for GF. So the question is what would this look like should we -- and how should we think about the split between repo and dividend when you just consider that the public float is pretty low?
Sam Franklin
ExecutivesAbsolutely. And as you can imagine, this is an area that is a nice situation for us to be in as we think about the continued flywheel of free cash generation that we've seen over the course of the last couple of years. We were back in 2023, a little over $300 million. We grew that to over $1 billion in 2024, and we expect to be on target to that roughly $1 billion in 2025 as well. Now capital allocation obviously takes many different forms. We've taken real concerted efforts over the last 12 months to optimize the balance sheet. We've taken out a lot of our long-term debt. And so really, the way we're thinking about it going forward is how do we look at this framework of shareholder capital allocation. I don't want to preview anything too soon. But clearly, format is a consideration there, whether that is repo buybacks or standard dividend program establishment as well. So stay tuned for more on that as we mature as a public company. This is a good situation for us to be in.
Timothy Arcuri
AnalystsYes, it's a good problem to have. So anyway, we're out of time, but thank you for the time.
Sam Franklin
ExecutivesThank you.
Timothy Breen
ExecutivesThank you.
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