Astera Labs Inc Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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

Question: Harlan Sur - JPMorgan Chase & Co - Analyst : Again, great execution by the team. Post the announcement of UALink 1.0 specification in April, this is the industry's first standard scale-up networking architecture. There have been a plethora of new scale-up announcements, mostly Ethernet-based scale-up architectures. I think the market has been concerned about these competitive architectures, but we know that GPU and XPU chip design cycle times are anywhere from 18 to 24 months and the scale-up architecture associated with these designs have been spec out like way in advance. So in other words, I assume that your design win pipeline and engagements, XPUs or GPUs that either have decided to use Scorpio X or UALink has not changed at all since the last earnings, maybe even expanded, but wanted to get the team's view. REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. NOVEMBER 04, 2025 / 9:30PM, ALAB.OQ - Q3 2025 Astera Labs Inc Earnings Call

Question: Harlan Sur - JPMorgan Chase & Co - Analyst : No, I appreciate that. And the team has talked about the Scorpio X as an anchor product, right? In other words, customers design your switch fabric solution. This creates the opportunity for additional content pull in, right, whether that's your signal conditioning products, your AEC, optical cable modules. Is this strategy playing out? In other words, if you look at, let's say, all of your Scorpio X engagements, what percentage of these engagements are also using your retimers, your AEC or optical cable module solutions? And do you have a sense of the average content uplift per XPU on these incremental attach?

Question: Blayne Curtis - Jefferies LLC - Analyst : Great results. Maybe I just want to start off on just level set. Obviously, you beat by a wide amount. I think you mentioned kind of the first two you mentioned was single conditioning and these SCM modules. I'm just trying to figure out if you can kind of -- I know you don't want to break out certain segments, but can you give us a little bit more color as to what drove the beat and what changed during the quarter?

Question: Blayne Curtis - Jefferies LLC - Analyst : And I want to ask you, I mean, obviously, the -- what NVIDIA has done with retimers was a lot of the talking points throughout the year, but you're starting to see these ASIC platforms going to be more material next year. Is there a way to think about that Aries family as these ASICs ramp on a relative basis versus the retimer content you're seeing today?

Question: Tore Svanberg - Stifel, Nicolaus & Company Inc - Analyst : Congrats on the strong results. So I had a question on the acquisition and you now penetration into the optical scale-up market. Just curious, material revenue time lines. I assume this is potentially the beginning of more to come. And maybe you could also discuss a little bit why you decided to intersect optical now versus perhaps prior or later.

Question: Tore Svanberg - Stifel, Nicolaus & Company Inc - Analyst : Yes. As part of my first question, when can we start to expect material revenue coming from optical products from Astera? Is that '27, '28, '29?

Question: Tore Svanberg - Stifel, Nicolaus & Company Inc - Analyst : Very good. And just as my follow-up, you talked about Taurus driving strong growth here in Q4. I think you mentioned 400 gig. Is that also diversified growth? Is this with more than one customer? And when do you see the inflection happening for Taurus for 800-gig in 2026?

Question: N. Quinn Bolton - Needham & Company LLC - Analyst : Let me offer my congratulations as well. I just wanted to come back to the Xscale Photonics acquisition as it's your first entry into the optical side of things. I think this technology looks like it's fiber chip coupling. It seems like you probably need some kind of silicon photonics capability to complete a scale-up CPO type solution. So just wondering, is that something you look to develop in-house? Would that be sort of an acquisition that you would look to pursue in the future? Just how do you complete that full scale-up CPO solution?

Question: N. Quinn Bolton - Needham & Company LLC - Analyst : And then I guess just wanted to come back to the comment about initial Scorpio X shipments in the fourth quarter. Is that kind of pre-production more sample units? Or are you starting to see the initial Scorpio X design win going to production? Is this the initial build of a production system?

Question: Sean O'Loughlin - Cowen and Company LLC - Analyst : Congrats again on the results. I wanted to ask maybe a bit of a technical one on the PCIe switch transition to a UALink native switch as we look towards that product's launch next year. How much of a step change is that in terms of silicon complexity and design? Or is it much more on the, call it, firmware or SDK side and the silicon is largely similar since they're both based on memory semantics rather than networking semantics? And then related to that, you talked about your customers taking a look at the UALink protocol, even though they're on PCIe today, how much of a lift is on their side when they're looking at the scale-up communication kernel and what can you do to sort of derisk that transition for them?

Question: Sean O'Loughlin - Cowen and Company LLC - Analyst : I really appreciate the color there. And I'll follow up with a quick clarification on the 20% PCIe Gen 6. I believe that was inclusive of both Scorpio P and Aries or was that an Aries-specific comment?

Question: Suji Desilva - Roth Capital Partners LLC - Analyst : Hi Jitendra, Sanjay Mike, congrats on the progress here. I know the optical revenue is down the line here. But just wondering in comparing pain points of bandwidth versus XPU density, which one kind of pushes customers faster to scale up using optical? Or is there a way to kind of handicap one versus the other?

Question: Suji Desilva - Roth Capital Partners LLC - Analyst : Okay. Great. So rack to rack. And then just a clarification on the 10 POC customers for PCIe, UALink for scale up. Are any of the customers pursuing anything Ethernet related with you? And are you working on any Ethernet stack efforts in-house yet? Or is it all PCIe to UALink roadmap today?