SMCI Super Micro Computer, Inc.
$39.84
Super Micro Computer, Inc. Q4 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
AI Conference Call Analysis
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Conference Moderator
Thank you. and Michael Staiger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Michael Staiger. Please go ahead.
Michael Staiger
Senior Vice President of Corporate Development
Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, and thank you for attending Supermicro's call to discuss financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended June 30th, 2026. With me today, as you know, are Charles Liang, founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, and David Weigand, chief financial officer. By now, you should have received a copy of the press release from the company that was distributed at the close of regular trading and is available on the company's website. As a reminder during today's call, The company will refer to a presentation that is available to participants in the investor relations section of the company's website under the events presentations tab. We've also published management scripted commentary on our website. Please note that some of the information you'll hear during our discussion today will consist of forward-looking statements, including without limitation those regarding revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, other income and expenses, taxes, capital allocation, and future business outlook. including guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and the full fiscal year 27. These statements and other comments are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to material differ from those anticipated and you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. You can learn more about these risks and uncertainties in the press release we issued earlier today, our most recent 10-K filing for fiscal 25 and other SEC filings. All these documents are available on the IR page of Supermicro's website. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Most of today's presentation will refer to non-GAAP financial results and business outlook. For any explanation of our non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the accompanying presentation or to our press release published earlier today. The non-GAAP measures are presented as we believe that they provide investors the means of evaluating and understanding how the company's management Evaluate the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for, or superior to financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. In addition, a reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP results is contained in today's press release and in the supplemental information attached to today's presentation. At the end of today's prepared remarks will have a Q&A session for sell-side analysts. Our fiscal 27, excuse me, quiet period begins at the close of business of Friday, September 11th, 2026. I'll now turn the call over to Charles. Thank you, Michael, and thank you all for joining today's call.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Fiscal year 2026 was a historical milestone for Supermicro as we nearly doubled our revenue year over year, going from $22 billion last year to $39 billion The world has been transformed by AI, and Schiphol Micro is transforming as well. From a USA-based server manufacturer into a leading AI IT data center total solution company. We design and manufacture our total data center building block solutions, DCPBS, in the USA, with many facilities. in USA, Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Netherlands. The demand for our AI IT solutions is even stronger than ever before as we are transforming into a total BCPBS company. A one-stop-shop company for customers who want to build their data center or AI factory quicker and better. In our pre-announcement, we disclosed over $60 billion in new orders, driven our order book and backlog to a new record levels as we enter fiscal year 2027. While Q4 revenue came in at $11.1 billion due to some short-term customer delay in power shortage, cooling, and Networking. We know this is purely a timing story. The good news is that now our customers can easily leverage our unique DCPBS total solution advantage and upcoming new technology and product lines to accelerate their time to deployment, we call TTD, and time to online, we call TTO, ensuring are strong future growth and long-term value for Supermicro for many years to come. Most importantly, our focus on profitability is yielding clear results. For the first quarter, I'm happy to report Nungap gross margin of 17.6% and $1.70 in Nungap dilute earnings per share. This margin expansion mainly came from our strategy focused on balancing customer mix and product mix while having a one-time positive contribution for the quarter. Since early 2026, we added dedicated departments and resources to focus on growing enterprise customer base and have expand our enterprise CPU-based server storage and IoT product lines. Our quicker growing, influencing, and agentic AI-centric products are also driven healthier profit margins for the company going forward. Another key to this margin expansion is our DCPPS, which delivers total solution value by seamlessly integrate GPU and CPU server, enterprise storage, direct liquid cooling solutions, CDU, chill door, water tower, high-speed data switch, and networking, data center management software, and full lifecycle services. This turnkey ecosystem enables customers to build and scale AI Data Center in quarters rather than years, dramatically reducing TCO and accelerating time to online and time to revenue for customers. We are further elevating this value proposition with our new proactive service model, where our data center management software and feed teams will automatically alert and be ready immediately to fix or maintain the failure unit, preventing reduction of computing power at the customer data center. As a new software with powerful management features and automatic service attached to our hardware builds, they deepen customer trust and drive long-term value. Our PCPBS is getting very powerful and it will soon contribute a significant net income to our business. By early next quarter, more of those solar features and service products will be online. On the operations side, we are complementing this high value strategy by driven higher manufacturing yields through factory automation, design optimization, and our highly versatile building block architecture. At the same time, we remain very focused on logistics and inventory management, significantly reducing inventory reserve and the expedite charge. Together, these operational disciplines will help moderate quarter-to-quarter margin fluctuation are driven by an even customer and product mix, supporting our goal of consistent growing gross margins. Turning to our key product domain, our system building block allows us to quickly optimize every major silicon platform. Through our long-term NVIDIA partnership, we are shipping volume skew across the GB300, MVLR72, HGX B300, B200 MVLR4, and RTX 6000 Pro organized. While preparing first to market Vora Rubin, we are MVLR72, Nubin HGX, and Vera C1, and other high-density Vera systems. With AMD, We launched complete new Helios product line and MI450 total solution alongside strong EPYC CPU, MI350 and MI355X momentum. Working with Intel, we brought Parcel Deck Edge AI system to market and shipping Xeon 6 Plus platform in volume. We also dedicated on developing product for the strong demand of ARM AGI process base, Conan Phoenix. Architecture optimized for high performance per one, influencing workloads. Demonstrating our silicon partners' deep confidence in our engineering excellence. To support a massive demand We continue to expand our physical footprint. In Silicon Valley, we recently announced our new 32-acre DCPBS campus, featuring advanced optical photonics networking lab and data center scale manufacturing, which brings our USA footprint to nearly 4 million square feet. Globally, our facilities in Taiwan, Malaysia, and the Netherlands are also ramping strongly to meet the demand, putting our total manufacturing capacity on track to exceed 6,000 racks per month, including more than 3,000 directly cooling racks per month. Especially, most of our DRC rack production line support a most dense lattice and 250 KY RAC platforms. Before I close, a quick update on our capital structure. Following our 5.6 billion financing in June, our balance sheet fully supports our component supply and business needs. Thank you to our strong cash position and more favorable customer and product mix. We currently have not planned to utilize our APM program, which we initiated a few months ago. At the same time, we remain focused on building financial efficiency. We need all of these operational and other advancements. I want to emphasize that our growth momentum is accelerating where it matters most. By expanding hundreds of new enterprise customers and other customers and leading the transition into an agentic and specialized AI workload, SuperMegal has become a fundamental architect of today's AI platform. Our DCPBS total solution, spanning CPU and GPU compute, storage, A&G, and 1.6T high-speed switch, upcoming optical networking, and our management software suite, including SCM, Supermicro Cloud Composer, SCM, Supermicro Data Center Manager, and SOM, Supermicro Orchestrator Manager, delivers the complete one-stop shop experience than modern enterprise, near-cloud, and any other data center customer needs. Looking to fiscal year 2027, our momentum gives us strong confidence to target our revenue in the range of $65 billion to $72 billion as we are in the process of historic infrastructure build-out. We are balancing top-line expansion with bottom-line profitability by focusing on growing enterprise customer base, customer mix, DCPPS solutions, and operational discipline. We are shaping the future of AI technology while delivering true technology value to our customers. I'm very confident that Thank you, Charles. We are pleased to report record fiscal year 26 revenue of $39.1 billion, up 78% over fiscal year 25 revenues, and $22 billion in record non-GAAP
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
fully diluted EPS of $3.63, up 76% over fiscal year 25 EPS of $2.06. Our fiscal year 26 ending backlog was at a record level with over $60 billion in new orders received during Q4 fiscal year 26, which we expect to fulfill over the coming quarters. Non-GAAP gross margins for fiscal year 26 were 10.9% versus 11.2% in fiscal year 25. Our fiscal year 26 non-GAAP operating margins expanded to 8.1% from 7.1% in fiscal year 25. Our customer base is diversifying and we had nine customers in fiscal year 26 with revenues greater than $1 billion each versus four such customers in fiscal year 25. Turning to fiscal Q4, fiscal year 26 results, we achieved revenue of $11.1 billion, up 93% year over year, and up 9% quarter over quarter. Revenue was near the low end of our guidance range of $11 billion to $12.5 billion due to delays in customer readiness, and we anticipate and many more. Our AI solutions contributed approximately 60% of total revenue in Q4 versus over 80% in Q3 due to the timing of some large AI project ramps. Based on our backlog, we believe greater than 80% of revenues will be AI-related solutions going forward. During Q4, enterprise and channel revenue was $5.6 billion, representing 50% of total revenue, compared with 28% in the prior quarter. Revenue in this segment increased 172% year over year and 98% quarter over quarter. During Q4, we saw a pickup in demand from enterprise and channel customers which were upgrading their compute, storage, and network infrastructure with more efficient CPU platforms. OEM appliance and large data center revenue was 5.5 billion, also representing 50% of total revenue, compared with 72% in the prior quarter. Revenue in this segment increased 50% year over year and decreased 26% quarter over quarter. For fiscal year 26, enterprise and channel revenue grew 39% and represented 31% of total revenue. The OEM appliance and large data center revenue grew 104% and represented 69% of total revenue. For fiscal year 26, we had one large data center slash CSP customer, which represented 28% of revenue. By geography, The U.S. represented 71% of Q4 revenue. Asia represented 11%. Europe represented 8%, and the rest of the world represented 10%. On a year-over-year basis, revenue in the U.S. grew 259%. Asia decreased 50%. Europe increased 4%, and the rest of the world increased 296%. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, revenue in the US grew 12%, Asia decreased 13%, Europe increased 25%, and the rest of the world increased 1%. Q4 non-GAAP gross margin was 17.6% versus our guidance of 8.2% to 8.4%. This was up from 10.1% in Q3. Gross margins improved by 750 basis points sequentially due to a better than anticipated customer and product mix, including the deferral of several contracts from Q4 fiscal year 26 to Q1 fiscal year 27 and perhaps the subsequent quarter. This favorable mix contributed approximately 75% of the gross margin improvement Lower tariff costs and lower inventory reserves drove the remaining 25% of the gross margin improvement. Q4 gap operating expenses were $455 million, up 44% year-over-year and 16% quarter-over-quarter on a non-gap basis. On a non-gap basis, operating expenses were $357 million, which was up 49% year-over-year and 28% quarter-over-quarter. The sequential increases in both GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses primarily reflected higher headcount related expenses and sales and marketing expenses. Non-GAAP operating margin was 14.3% in Q4 compared with 7.2% in Q3. Other income and expense for Q4 was a net expense of 19 million consisting of 61 million in interest and other income offset by $80 million in interest expense related to our convertible notes and revolving credit facilities. The Q4 tax provision was $290 million on a GAAP basis and $316 million on a non-GAAP basis. The Q4 GAAP tax rate was 19.7%, while the non-GAAP tax rate was 20.1%. For fiscal year 26, the GAAP tax rate was 19.9%. compared with 12.9% in fiscal year 25. The non-GAAP tax rate was 20.4% compared with 15.4% in fiscal year 25. Q4 GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.62 compared with our guidance range of 53 cents to 67 cents. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.70 compared with our guidance range of 65 cents to 79 cents. The results exceeded our guidance primarily due to higher gross margins. For fiscal year 26, GAAP diluted earnings per share was $3.26 compared with $1.68 in fiscal year 25. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $3.63 compared with $2.06 in fiscal year 25. The GAAP diluted share count increased sequentially from 692 million shares in Q3 to 705 million shares in Q4. The non-GAAP diluted share count increased from 709 million shares to 721 million shares over the same period. Cash provided by operating activities in Q4 was 747 million. compared with cash used in operating activities of 6.6 billion in the prior quarter. For fiscal year 26, cash used in operating activities was 6.8 billion compared with cash provided by operating activities of 1.66 billion in fiscal year 25. Q4 closing inventory was 12.9 billion up from 11.1 billion at the end of Q3. CapEx totaled $28 million in Q4, resulting in free cash flow of $722 million. For fiscal year 26, CapEx was $162 million compared with $127 million in fiscal year 25 as we invested in our expanding capacity globally. During the quarter, we completed public equity offerings, raising $5.6 billion after offering expenses comprising 1.4 billion of common stock and 4.2 billion of mandatory convertible preferred shares. The proceeds from these offerings will be used primarily to support increased working capital needed to support our new orders. At quarter end, cash and cash equivalents totaled 7.5 billion. Bank borrowings and convertible note debt totaled 8.7 billion resulting in net debt of $1.2 billion compared with net debt of $7.5 billion at the end of the prior quarter. Turning to the balance sheet and working capital metrics, the cash conversion cycle increased by 43 days from 106 days in Q3 to 149 days in Q4. Days of inventory increased by 13 days to 119 days from 106 days in the prior quarter as we built inventory in anticipation of higher revenues going into fiscal year 27. Day sales outstanding decreased by 26 days to 59 days from 85 days in Q3 as we realized collections from some large customers. Days payables outstanding decreased by 56 days to 29 days versus 85 days in Q3 due to a significant reduction in our average and David Weigand. David Weigand. David Weigand. David Weigand. David Weigand. to $15.5 billion. GAAP diluted net income per share to be between $0.89 and $0.98, and non-GAAP diluted net income per share to be between $1.01 and $1.10. Based on the expected customer and product mix, we expect gross margin to be in the range of 10.4% to 10.8%. We successfully completed the issuance of 4.2 billion of mandatory convertible preferred shares in Q4. Due to that issuance, our GAAP and non-GAAP EPS is computed based on the two-class method in which we allocated a portion of our net income for participating convertible preferred shares. This impacts our Q1 FY27 EPS guidance and should be considered in all EPS calculations going forward. Please see the earnings release tables for further details. GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately 453 million, including approximately 127 million in stock-based compensation expenses, which are excluded from non-GAAP operating expenses. The outlook for Q1 of fiscal year 2027 fully diluted GAAP earnings per share includes approximately 106 million and expected stock-based compensation expenses. Net of tax effects of 32 million, which are excluded from non-GAAP diluted net income per common share. We expect other income and expense, including interest expense, to result in a net expense of approximately 45 million. The company's projections for Q1 fiscal year 27 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted net income per common share assume a GAAP tax rate of 20.1%, a non-GAAP tax rate of 20.5%, and a fully diluted share count of 745 million shares for GAAP and 761 million shares for non-GAAP. Capital expenditures for Q1 are expected to be in the range of 50 to 60 million. And for the full fiscal year 27, We expect net sales to be in the range of $65 to $72 billion. Michael, we're ready for Q&A now.
Michael Staiger
Senior Vice President of Corporate Development
Great. Jen?
Jen
Conference Moderator
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Ananda Barua with Loop Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Ananda Barua
Analyst, Loop Capital
Yeah, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two if I could. And congrats on the strong results and the ongoing improvement and profitability here. And let me start just with that. Charles, Dave, what's a good way to think about what fiscal year 27 gross margins can be. You benefited from mix in June. Sounds like you're absorbing some of that mix from deal push out in September. It's still a nice improvement, apples to apples and gross margin guide. Can you walk us through how we should think about sort of the puts and takes on the margins, mix, CPU, things like that, and number one, how should we think about what's the useful estimate for gross margin fiscal year 27 and what may be the progression? And then I have a quick follow-up, thanks.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Okay, thank you for the question. Yes, I mean, we will be very careful control of balance between revenue and profitability. As you know, high volume GPU margin usually much lower. CPU, storage, IoT, enterprise application, on the other hand, have a higher margin. So we will try to balance between the two vertical. Especially last 12 months, we have continued to grow Salesforce in the enterprise and application, server application, storage. So looking forward, we will consistently growing our overall gross margin. Although we will still grow very aggressive, very fast in GPU, but we will focus much more than before on enterprise and CPU storage. And also the PCPPS product line is getting mature. So we are shipping more and more DCPBS Hardware and also software service and some switches as well. So DCPBS will be our long-term much better profit margin product line.
Ananda Barua
Analyst, Loop Capital
And so just to clarify before my second question, Charles, I believe I heard you say you anticipate margins to improve from September quarter levels, given the factors that you just mentioned. Did I hear you correctly there?
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
September, would you say?
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, so we guided to 10.4 to 10.8 for September. And we're doing everything we can, as Charles mentioned, to find the best margins that we can.
Ananda Barua
Analyst, Loop Capital
Okay, that's great. And then the follow-up is, Maybe just to dovetail off of Charles's CPU remark, sounds like you had 80% of revenue as AI in your Q3, 60% in Q4, looking for 80% again in Q1. Charles talked about taking on more CPU servers, storage and networking. What is a useful way to think about what that sort of 20% that's not AI What is that? And then if I could just squeeze in quickly, any update on the board investigation, the board inquiry? I assume it's coming close to completion, but any update there would be great too. That's it for me, thanks.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it depends on customer mix. And when large data center order allow, for sure, AI percentage will be higher. But when David say 80% will be AI, I believe that include two marked segments. One is traditional AI. The other one is application AI, agentic AI or edge AI. So the pure AI will be about 60% to 70%, while another 10% to 20% AI will be CPU-based AI or kind of agentic AI, edge AI. And the other 20% will be pure traditional server storage IoT. So I get it 100%.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
As to your second question, Ananda, we expect to provide an update shortly. And that's all we can share on this call.
Ananda Barua
Analyst, Loop Capital
Thanks so much, guys. Really appreciate it.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Cardoso with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
MP (for Joseph Cardoso)
Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Hi, thank you for taking my question. This is MP on for Joseph Cardoso. For my first question, just wanted to double-click on your robust orders, which you saw during the quarter. You mentioned 60 billion plus orders. Maybe anything in terms of customer concentration within that order growth, which you saw, as well as any more incremental color in terms of what really was the driver behind such a robust uptick in orders there. And I have a follow-up.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I mean, around $60 billion, I would like to say 70% AI, pure AI. The other 30% is either CPU or CPU-based AI or kind of HAI, AI application. So overall, I believe our profit margin mix will be getting better.
MP (for Joseph Cardoso)
Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Okay, got it. And for my follow-up, just wanted to ask in terms of you mentioned that you achieved some success in terms of customer diversification where you have, I think, nine customers which are $1 billion plus during FI26. Anything in terms of the nature of those customers, maybe in terms of your cloud versus enterprises versus sovereign AI customers, any more incremental color there will be helpful. Thank you.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, so we have a lot of emerging, you know, neoclouds and CSPs. And so they were, and some enterprise customers that were in that mix that we mentioned.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, the addition is CPU-based AI, for example. NVIDIA now also have a Vera CPU-based AI. That's from NVIDIA. And AMD CPU-based AI, ARM-based, right? and Intel-based. So now the AI is kind of a majority still GPU-based, but still the CPU-based AI is also growing quickly, especially for a genetic AI application.
MP (for Joseph Cardoso)
Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Thank you. Thank you.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your next question comes from the line of Asia Merchant with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Asia Merchant
Analyst, Citi
Great. Thanks for taking my question here. Two, if I may. One of them was just, was there any change in buying patterns specifically for the large DC and CSC customers? I understand that there was a shipment delay into 1Q. From what I understand, the guide incorporates that the shipment from 4Q would be shipped into fiscal 1Q. But are you sensing any change in the buying patterns from these large Data Center CSP customers that you're predominant in. And, you know, because there seems to be some investor concern that maybe these customers are going more directly to ODMs than they have been typically to the likes of Supermicro. And then I have a quick follow-up.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Okay. Yeah, for sure. I mean, a large data center always have power readiness, data center readiness. are concerned, especially liquid cooling. So our customer base overall have a similar concern as well. But still, basically, the order shipment for September quarter, December quarter have been quite strong. And also, I mean, a super micro business model is a bit special, indeed quite special. We have OEM business. but we also cover ODM business. So we have lots of data center, large data center customer now, and especially kind of new cloud. And at the same time, we are growing very aggressively for enterprise server, traditional server and storage. So overall, we are kind of, again, both ODM and OEM. We will continue to grow in both ways.
Asia Merchant
Analyst, Citi
Okay, thank you. And for my follow-up, the Liquid Cool Data Centers, are you able to provide what percentage of revenues those are? And, you know, if you can give any further details on verticals between enterprise versus these large data centers slash TSP customers that you have for the Liquid Cool Data Centers. Thank you.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
As you know, I mean, we are one of the very early liquid cooling technology leaders. In 2014, for example, we shipped, I guess, 80% plus liquid cooling to the market. And now more and more platforms are liquid cooling ready, including GPU liquid cooling and CPU liquid cooling, like Beirut, Dubai, Lupin, and even Vera, Vera's CPU base. Lots of our Vera CPU base will be liquid cooling as well. And some AMD Intel CPU also liquid cooling. So overall liquid cooling will continue to grow quickly and very soon will dominate the data center business, I believe.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Katherine Murphy with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Katherine Murphy
Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Thank you very much. Charles, you noted that you're making investments into the sales force to address the enterprise opportunity specifically. Can you talk about the progress that you've made here and what further investments need to be made in both go-to-market and in the product features and capabilities of Supermicro's portfolio in order to better address this opportunity and if this run rate Thank you very much.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Sure. So I'll address the question on the operating expenses. So there are certainly some expenses that we expect to go up and others that we expect to come down. And so we think that the levels that we have are at the proper level. and if you look at our historical growth rate in operating expenses, it's less than half of our revenue growth rate.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, as a technology company, our investment in new technology continues to be very aggressive. For example, the high-speed switch, the optical technology. So overall, our data center total solution with our DCPBS-centric and the focus will be continually strong.
Katherine Murphy
Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Thank you. And could you talk more about the sales force and how you're engaging with this expanded enterprise customer set, understanding that this is a broader opportunity than the types of engagements that Supermicro may have had in the past?
Michael Staiger
Senior Vice President of Corporate Development
Yeah, hey, this is Mike Staiger. I just want to chime in on Salesforce and some of the Salesforce changes. And you probably saw that we elevated a few of our individuals, Matt Buber is Chief Revenue Officer, Vik Malyala is Chief Business Officer. And there's been a focus on efficiency and aligning the Salesforce with a solution sale element to address the AI opportunity ahead, which is supportive of better margins. So there's definitive actions in place. to make those improvements. And we'll keep you posted as we go out through the year as we expand and make those changes to address the market opportunity.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Mr. Saath. As a technology leading company, before we are mostly focused on engineering, production, customer service. But now we're getting focused much more on enterprise and growing our overall balance. especially enterprise as you know, the profit margin is always better, right? So we are growing our sales force aggressively now.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your next question comes from the line of Ruplu Bhattacharya with Bank of America. Your line is open, please go ahead.
Ruplu Bhattacharya
Analyst, Bank of America
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. David, given the pace of GPU platform transitions, how are you managing inventory risk around each new generation? And what gives you the confidence that the record order backlog that you now have won't result in significant inventory exposure if customer deployment schedules or platform configurations change? I'm asking this because Supermicro has had some issues in the past, and I have a follow-up.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Sure. So I think everyone in the industry and our industry has to watch out for changes in technology. But what we've found was with prices rising so fast, a lot of times now some of the old inventory does get resold favorably. Nonetheless, as you point out, you don't want to get caught having to hold that inventory. There is risk in that. So what we do is we try to ensure as much as possible that we have non-councilable POs. And we also try to, you know, match our procurement along with, you know, along with the shipment schedules as much as possible. Okay.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Other than that, most of our products are designed based on billion-dollar solutions. So lots of our subsystems are compatible or optimized for different product lines or even different generation of products. So that will help us a lot in maintaining inventory when technology generation changes.
Ruplu Bhattacharya
Analyst, Bank of America
Okay, thanks for the details there. As a follow-up, can I ask, now that the business is scaling towards $70 billion of annual revenue, how should we think about working capital intensity and operating cash conversion in fiscal 27? I think Charles said something about this in his prepared remarks. I didn't fully catch that. But David, do you expect in fiscal 27 the growth to be self-funded now from operating cash flow, or will the company need incremental external financing to support inventory and receivables beyond the race that you'd recently had. Thank you. Thanks for taking my question.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Sure, Rupalu. So I think as I mentioned in my prepared comments that we do expect the cash conversion cycle to improve. And it's not the reason for that is when we look at our backlog, we have improved terms. and which will help us on our cash flow conversion. So therefore, we expect that this will allow us to carry a greater volume of business. And so we're gonna do everything possible to utilize our balance sheet, which is much stronger. And if you look at our current assets and our current liabilities, it's stronger than most companies that you'll see. you know, out on the market. And so we expect to use the strength of our balance sheet as well as our good customer base, you know, to help us fund our growth.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, once we keep between 65 billion to 72 billion, I guess our cash flow now is pretty enough. But if there are chance to grow much higher revenue, then we may need more cash flow. For example, 80 billion or beyond 80 billion. So there are some possibilities like that, but we will carefully come through.
Ruplu Bhattacharya
Analyst, Bank of America
Okay. Thank you for the details there.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your next question comes from the line of George Notter with Wolf Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
George Notter
Analyst, Wolfe Research
Hi, guys. Thanks for the question. I wanted to ask if you're seeing any relief or shift in sort of the AI pricing environment overall. and then sort of just like the balancing revenues and margins commentary. Should we take that to mean that you guys are walking away from some low margin deals right now? Or are you sort of managing some of the proof point deals that you guys have done on the next generation racks in the past? And then I'd follow up.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, that's why we forecast between 65 to 72 billion. So we like to support as many customers as we can, but the business has to be healthy. The margin has to be at least meet the minimum financial kind of demand.
George Notter
Analyst, Wolfe Research
Got it.
Victor Chiu
Analyst, Raymond James
Okay.
George Notter
Analyst, Wolfe Research
And then just to dive a little bit deeper in the traditional server and storage benefits right now. Is a lot of that sort of standalone CPU demand? What is sort of like the attach rate or the sort of synergies with the AI side of the business look like? And then how are margins sort of apples to apples trending in that business? Thanks, guys.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, very good question. Yes, in last many years, we fully focus on GPU market, AI market. When companies become bigger, I mean, yes, we circle back to focus on enterprise CPU-based market as well, including enterprise and kind of industry PC IoT storage-based application. So we are going to make our balance between gross revenue and
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
And I think, by the way, I'll add to that. I think we did a reasonable job year over year because we grew our top line by 78% and we grew our bottom line by almost the same amount. So I think that shows on a year over year basis what goals we're after.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your next question comes from the line of Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Nehal Chokshi
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets
Yeah, thank you. Congrats on amazing gross margin results. Charles, do you see the value add that Superbrico can add to NVIDIA ecosystem being different from and the XPU ecosystem, somewhat implied by the discussion in the earnings deck around the ARM, AGI, CTU platform?
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yes, still lots of chance we can add our value. For example, our DCPBS solution, they're all for customer, complete data center build-out support, not just GPU, CPU storage, all major components for data center. And other than that, lots of authentic AI application. We have lots of optimization. For example, the Vera-based solution, the Lubin, HGX-based, and lots of other workstation-based. We see still lots of room. We can differentiate
Nehal Chokshi
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets
I guess what I'm trying to drive at is that NVIDIA is designing full systems and where you guys come in is helping end customers customize those full systems. But with the ARM AGICP platform, perhaps there's more for system design help that Supermicro can bring to the table relative to the NVIDIA ecosystem.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I mean, yes, for example, better time to market. Whenever CPU and GPU are available, with our architecture, we are able to provide a better time to market and quality, not just design quality, production quality, deployment quality, and service. kind of work with customer for a whole data center deployment and bring data center to operation and maintain high availability. Make sure customer have a minimal failure system. So we see indeed more and more customer appreciate our partnership. So it's not just buy and go. It's kind of buy and work together.
Nehal Chokshi
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets
Okay, great. And then David, just real quickly, you mentioned that the backlog has improved terms with respect to cash conversion cycle. Is those improved terms because of customers or is it because you're seeing a higher percentage of that backlog represent repeat orders and repeat orders potentially have more favorable terms?
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, so you broke up just a little bit, Nehal, but let me answer what I thought I heard you ask, and that is we really had a combination of two things. We had new customers come in, but we also had existing customers that we were already selling to, and we tightened the terms of those contracts. So that's what... gives us a little better visibility into our cash conversion cycle.
Nehal Chokshi
Analyst, Northland Capital Markets
Great. That's super helpful. Thank you, David.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your next question comes from the line of Brandon Nispel with KeyBank Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBank Capital Markets
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask about DCBBS. You had previously guided for that to about 20% of gross profit for this year. Could you maybe update us on how that contributed to revenue gross profit for this year and how you're thinking about that for 2027? And I have a follow-up. Thanks.
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thank you for that question. I mean, yes, DCBBS is a big project. I mean, we provide all our data center hardware, and also management software and deployment, networking, make sure customer have highest availability and efficient maintenance. So it is a kind of combination of all. So for example, management software, I mean, earlier next quarter, we will provide proactive and many more. That's the service package. That's the feature, the service to maintain customers' maximum availability. Make sure all the servers they invest are working instead of failure and waiting there, for example. So, I mean, we see a very good, very big room to grow, and the whole networking design management tool. So we see a big room to grow. 20% should be not far away.
Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBank Capital Markets
Got it. Thanks, Charles. And David, unpacking your comments around gross margins with 75% coming from Mix and 25% coming from tariff and inventory write downs. It's about $700 million for Mix and $230 million from the other bucket on my math. So within Mix, I'm curious, what did vendor rebates look like this quarter? And then within tariffs, did you book a tariff rebate? Thanks.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, that's a great question. and let me say we did not book a tariff rebate in our numbers. We are actively pursuing refunds, but we did not take a benefit for those until we see them. I think the rest of the industry is expecting that the tariffs may go back up. and David Weigand. David Weigand. David Weigand.
Brandon Nispel
Analyst, KeyBank Capital Markets
I appreciate the color. And if I could do one more. On the gross margin guidance, I think it's 10.6% for the first quarter. If we were to normalize that for tariffs and inventory write-downs, how do you see that from a year-over-year standpoint? I know from a reported basis it's up, but last year you definitely had more tariffs in the numbers and definitely more and other inventory write downs that hurt those results. So I was wondering if you could sort of help us from a normalized year over year perspective in the first quarter.
David Weigand
Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, so my comparisons were more quarter to quarter, you know, where we came down, you know, a lot on tariffs and on excess and obsolete inventory. Year over year, yeah, I think, The same things are going to hold true with tariffs coming down a lot in this quarter with the suspension of the IEEP tariffs. And I think there's no question that we had good results on our E&O this quarter. And so that was what we would consider a non-recurring event. Understood. Appreciate you taking the questions.
Jen
Conference Moderator
Your final question comes from the line of Victor Chiu with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Victor Chiu
Analyst, Raymond James
Hi, guys. Thank you. I wanted to circle back on one of Charles' previous comments. Can you just provide some color around how much of your backlog and end demand are being impacted by the shift towards the gen-ticket inference workloads from trading workloads. Are you observing kind of this inflection right now in your results? And I guess how does the inflection kind of impact the mix of shipments between CPUs and GPUs in the immediate term and kind of going forward?
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, kind of it's basically a complicated mix I would have to say still 70-something percent GPU, maybe high 20% CPU. But still, some GPU now is identical GPU or kind of aging GPU. So it's kind of, in terms of profit margin, the aged GPU is between traditional GPU and CPU. So it's a complicated combination. But overall, with our DCPBS is growing quickly. So I believe we should be able to maintain the profit margin we plan for.
Victor Chiu
Analyst, Raymond James
I got it. And are you seeing kind of a shift at all, any changes in this? Or I understand mix, that you kind of
Charles Liang
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
alluding to but you know is this yeah how is that compared you know to you know maybe you know a year ago or you know in terms of kind of the workloads influencing that yeah yeah long-term GPU percentage will continue to grow I believe but again lots of GPU will become uh uh we are using an application uh identical AI uh enterprise AI um So overall GPU market I believe will be not just big, but also get into every vertical. And that's what we believe at this moment.
Victor Chiu
Analyst, Raymond James
Thank you very much.
Jen
Conference Moderator
We have reached the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.