Astera Labs Inc at Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference Transcript

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : So we did the IPO this year. So people will probably have a fair amount of familiarity with, but can you just give a little bit of an overview of the company and the types of products that you guys develop for starters?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Great. Can you talk about -- before we dig into the products in the markets, the sort of through line for your success in differentiation. You started with a base of kind of very strong capability in areas like retimers, but you also have a software stack that's quite important to you. And I feel like relationships with the hyperscalers are a really important aspect of your success. So maybe just talk about those aspects of your differentiation?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : You've done really well. And I think the competition that you have is kind of the biggest companies in semiconductors from the Broadcoms and Marvells to TI microchip to maybe in some areas, NVIDIA and Mellanox. Have you -- how have you moved so quickly? Some of your competitors will say, well, they're using licensed building blocks to get there, and so they might get first to market, but we can do it better. Can you just kind of address those things? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. MARCH 05, 2025 / 12:05AM, ALAB.OQ - Astera Labs Inc at Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Very helpful. So maybe we dig into some of the products, starting with the retimer business. You guys have had a dominant share of Gen 5 retimers in AI. You are now first to market with Gen 6. Can you talk about how Gen 6 is going in terms of calls? And that business in general has been a very strong growth driver for you to continue to be through the year?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Yes. Even before we get to the switch, I feel like it's important to understand the number of different configurations for something like a GB200, the number of different configurations that are out there. And I feel like we all, at one point, felt like we could define the retimer content in those systems. And it turns out there's a lot more content than we all thought. Can you just talk generally to the NVIDIA approach to market that allows for customization at the cloud level and allows for opportunity for you guys?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Yes. That's very helpful. And I wonder if you could also talk to the retimer opportunity in ASIC systems where there -- NVIDIA does have NVLink, which is not a technology that helps you in the ASIC world. They don't have that, and they're using your technology to establish a lot of that same connectivity. Can you talk to that?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Great. That's very helpful. And just a couple of other retimer questions that come up a lot. Market share on Gen 5, are those sockets established at this point? Is there still any potential market share battle there? And then general purpose retimer and general purpose compute.

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Okay. I lied on the market share. I lied on the last retimer question because I did want to also ask another question that comes up. Those ASIC retimer wins, the ASIC providers are also retimer competitors. Does that give them an advantage in the retimer part of the business?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Yeah. Okay. Great. So second product line you guys introduced was the active Ethernet cable, Taurus. Can you talk about that market? And what's your progress there? It seems like the big opportunities as we start transitioning to higher speeds. REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. MARCH 05, 2025 / 12:05AM, ALAB.OQ - Astera Labs Inc at Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Okay. Great. And then third product family, CXL 2, a little bit more of a general purpose focus there. And it seems like you're actually getting quite a bit of interest around some of these memory multiplexing types of applications. Can you talk about your products in CXL 2?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Okay. Helpful. So then the product we didn't know about at the time of the IPO was Scorpio. In the switch market, which it was a little bit surprising to me, it's a little bit more of an established market. Can you talk about your position there? And you've talked about it being your biggest market over time. Can you give us color on that? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. MARCH 05, 2025 / 12:05AM, ALAB.OQ - Astera Labs Inc at Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : And is that opportunity different in merchant versus ASIC solutions?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Great. So switching gears, I wonder if you guys could talk to the health of the overall AI investment. And you guys have given pretty positive commentary for your business for the year. So I know what you guys are seeing, but I feel like people every time we see a new innovation in models like DeepSeek or we see somebody somewhere delays of building for a new data center, people sort of see that as the sign of the end of all of this. Do you guys see any indications of that? And just the stability of the investment, the duration of the investment from your visibility would be kind of helpful.

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : And that agnosticism between custom silicon and GPU gives you a balance. I mean, it seems like this year, ASICs very strong in the first half, maybe GPU is a little stronger in the second half. Is that the right way to think of it?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : And because you have that agnosticism, you might have visibility into the question of export controls as well. It's obviously impossible to know what may happen there. But your sense of is that changing customer behavior now because there's uncertainty about what may come.

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : Okay. That's helpful. Great. I assume we have questions from the audience. We have a lot, I guess. Do we have a mic? Maybe start in the back.

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : We have time for one more question. There's one in the front here. REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. MARCH 05, 2025 / 12:05AM, ALAB.OQ - Astera Labs Inc at Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference Unidentified Participant So there's a number of hyperscalers talking about a million cluster GPUs or custom silicon. Can you elaborate a bit on the complexity for you on sort of the networking side or on the connectivity side when you built those type of clusters, especially when you go non-NVIDIA?

Question: Joseph Moore - Morgan Stanley & Co LLC - Analyst : That's very helpful. Sanjay, Mike, thanks so much for your time.