SMART Global Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Adams: That’s a tougher one for us to kind of do that. Let me — in my script, I talked about our deployment of GPUs at scale, as kind of roughly over 50,000 GPUs. And if you kind of play that out in the industry, you can see that level of scale. It’s kind of hard, because I’ve got to like take liberty with definitions when we talk about an AI system and that include the networking component, the storage component, service component or is it just the platform and so we don’t really have a good metric and I just don’t want to mislead you. But the index I just gave you of 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs under management, that’s — that should be telling that we’re looking to continue to grow and invest in that area. But, Ken will take a little bit more…

Ken Rizvi: Yes, Tom, it’s a good question. I think if you look at it, and as Mark mentioned, it’s tough to decipher one for one, but if I look at systems that either use a lot of GPUs or systems that in Jack’s business and Specialty Memory that are going into the data center for these generative AI applications and the like. My guess is that number for our fiscal ‘23 is probably trending north of $250 million in aggregate, could be north of $300 million if we look at it on a blended basis.

Tom O’Malley: So you’re saying fiscal ‘23, the AI exposure is greater than $300 million.

Ken Rizvi: I’d say two greater than $250 million, approaching the $300 million.

Tom O’Malley: Got it, helpful. And then Mark, you made the comment that Q2, looking back, may have been the bottom for the LED business. Could you talk about what you’ve seen in terms of changing trends there. Obviously there were some tough times in China, but could you just remark on what’s gotten better?

Mark Adams: Sure. I think the primary index for us has been, despite some continued channel burn, the customer design activity, which is a good precursor and index for us, the customer design activity is up and positive. And look, I don’t want to celebrate too much from the bottom, but revenue quarter-over-quarter [three, two] (ph) was up 15%-ish and that at a time where there was still more channel burn. So, we’re not — it’s not like we’re building inventory in the channel to achieve revenue growth. We got good revenue growth in the bottom at a time where the channel is still burning some revenues. So I would just say overall, that coupled with the design activity, is very favorable. The other thing I would say is, this LED market environment is not germane or specific to Cree.

As a matter of fact, I would encourage you to benchmark Cree’s performance relative to the competitive landscape. Cree has done a great job and it’s just been a tough business very similar to the memory environment, Tom. But Cree has done a great job navigating some really tough headwinds during the macroeconomic environment they faced and I’m just really impressed how they’ve kind of navigated and gotten to today.

Tom O’Malley: Helpful and then just if I could sneak in one more. Traditionally, you see some very strong seasonality for your IPS business into the November quarter. You commented in your slides for IPS that you just completed the second phase with Meta on the SuperCluster. Is there any reason why November seasonality would be any different than what you’ve seen historically there just given some of the programs have wound down?