Jason Phillips
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Thank you, Rob. It's great to be here with you this morning. The past several years have seen our business on an incredible growth trajectory. In the midst of what is potentially the most significant secular investment cycle in a generation, we are in the incredible position of supporting the world's largest data center customers in their massive infrastructure buildouts to enable the growth in applications of artificial intelligence. This year, we are tracking towards $9 billion of revenue, more than doubling the size of our business from just 3 years ago. Alongside this growth, our business mix has shifted towards higher complexity customized programs within our HPS portfolio, helping drive strong profitability. Double-clicking on our HPS portfolio, we are expecting to deliver approximately $5 billion in revenue for 2025, an incredible 80% growth, which speaks to the tremendous uptake from customers for our offerings. We take a long-term view towards our investments and product road maps, investing early to help customers accelerate deployment of leading technologies. We have consistently grown our investments in R&D over the years. We increased our spend more than 50% this year, and we expect at least a 50% increase in 2026 in support of new program wins that will ramp beginning over the next 2 years. Our design engineering talent is an important differentiator for our business. We have scaled our team today to more than 1,100 dedicated design engineers, supporting both hardware and software solutions across 7 global design sites and growing, and we expect to add several hundred additional resources in the immediate future. Our recognized leadership in design has been critical to winning the many new programs, which are driving our growth. Next, we'll take a look at some of the key technology developments and design challenges we are seeing in the data center and where our team is making investments to address those opportunities. Importantly, as a platform solutions company, we are aiming to address these challenges at the systems level. In AI/ML compute, we are making investments in our rack-scale capabilities to support applications for both training and inferencing workloads, which we will touch on more shortly. To stay ahead of the latest advances in liquid cooling, Celestica is building proof of concepts for our next generation of solutions, which includes innovations in single-phase, dual phase and emerging liquid metal technologies. The rapid advances in switching silicon bring with it increasing complexity in designing the latest networking platforms, particularly challenges in addressing power density and signal integrity. Celestica is addressing these by driving innovations in our switch designs for 200-gig SerDes solutions to support 1.6T platforms and are planning early-stage investments for 400-gig SerDes to support 3.2T platforms. We're also staying close to the advances in optical technologies that will increasingly be utilized in high-performance networking such as linear pluggable optics, co-packaged optics alongside other interconnect technologies such as co-packaged copper. As an example, our latest 800-gig and 1.6T switch designs support LPO for optimized power efficiency. And we are in the early stages of our product road maps for our future generations of switching solutions that will accommodate CPO technology. We also see scale-up networking, which supports high-speed direct connectivity between accelerators as an emerging multibillion-dollar new market opportunity that is being unlocked in large part by the move towards open standards, supported by industry initiatives like UALink and Ethernet for scale-up networking. We are already on the path through recent program wins towards productizing our first solutions for scale-up Ethernet, which will leverage Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 silicon. We look ahead at emerging technologies by proactively investing and collaborating with our ecosystem partners to define future product road maps. This enables speed to market and establishes Celestica as an essential partner for our customers' next-generation deployments. As noted, Celestica looks to address technology leads at the system level. And accordingly, we have invested in developing capabilities to support full platform solutions. Our customers engage with us to support a wide array of programs and technologies and leverage the depth of our capabilities to varying degrees. However, we have increasingly observed our hyperscaler and digital native customers seeking bespoke solutions for rack-scale systems, making our full suite of capabilities across multiple technologies increasingly essential. Critically, we are seeing this demand in both networking and AI/ML compute, where customers are seeking solutions for both custom ASIC and emerging merchant silicon platforms. Beyond designing the hardware for base technologies in networking, compute and storage, our engineering teams are supporting customers in orchestrating, testing and optimizing their rack-scale solutions, including the customization of software platforms as well as aftermarket services. Our ability to deliver system-level solutions of this kind requires our breadth and depth of capabilities in all of these areas with the ability to integrate them into a seamless solution for the customer. Software is an increasingly critical component of our comprehensive solutions. To support this, we are making focused investments in our capabilities, having grown our global team to nearly 400 dedicated software engineers. We believe that open-source network operating systems, namely SONiC, are positioned for continued market adoption driven by the desire for vendor diversity, cost effectiveness and sustained improvement and innovation. We have a long history of working with SONiC and our proficiency with this platform is well respected in the industry. Our Celestica solutions for SONiC customizes and hardens SONiC features, providing customers bespoke solutions with an open-source base as well as related support services. But our software capabilities go beyond SONiC too, as we offer customers the optionality to leverage third-party solutions. And for hyperscalers using a proprietary network operating system, our software knowledge allows us to provide critical support with switch abstraction interfaces, ensuring silicon interoperability across the fabric and to assist with network operating system debugging and testing of customized hardware. Our ability to deliver a diverse range of leading solutions is significantly enhanced by our ecosystem of partners across both silicon and software. Leveraging these relationships, we work closely and proactively with our technology partners, aligning years ahead of time on next-generation product roadmaps, enabling us to be early to market and deploying leading-edge solutions for our customers. And our technology partners attest to the critical part we play in productizing and delivering these leading-edge solutions to the market. Broadcom's President and CEO, Hock Tan, highlights the significance of our capabilities and execution by recognizing Celestica as their preferred provider for the most technically demanding data center platform solutions. The strategic relationships between Celestica and industry leaders like Broadcom are a powerful testament to the importance of our role in enabling these critical technologies. Now let's take a deeper dive into our market opportunities. As mentioned, we are witnessing a generational secular investment cycle in data center infrastructure, driven by artificial intelligence and cloud adoption. Many of the indicators from the companies leading this investment across silicon designers, hyperscalers and the emerging leaders in large language models point towards a multiyear runway of continued growth in data center CapEx. Annual data center CapEx is forecasted to surpass $1 trillion by 2028, with commentary from leading voices in the industry suggesting this could prove to be conservative. These companies regularly highlight constraints in compute capacity driven by the increasing demands from both training and inference. All of these companies have signaled their commitments to continue to grow their investments in AI infrastructure, which aligns with the forecasts and planning discussions we are having with our customers. Within our portfolio, hyperscaler customers have continued to be the primary driver of our revenue growth over the past several years. Demand remains incredibly strong and is supported by solid visibility based on program awards that are expected to begin ramping over the next 2 years. Furthermore, we're unlocking the next wave of expansion with our digital native customer portfolio, which is poised to ramp meaningfully starting in 2027 with the delivery of our first HPS rack-scale custom AI system, which we initially announced in January. Our broad portfolio exposure to AI-driven investments from the largest and most established players in the sector ensures our business is exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. Moving on, we'll discuss the opportunities across our markets. Our communications portfolio is anticipated to generate $7 billion in revenue in 2025, an exceptional 78% growth. Our portfolio is anchored by our networking solutions with our 800-gig switch programs comprising the largest share and our most significant growth driver in 2025. We anticipate that continued growth in 800-gig and multiple ramps in 1.6T beginning in 2026, including strong engagement in scale-up Ethernet, support a robust multiyear growth outlook for our networking business with our existing customer base alone. In addition, we also have a growing funnel of opportunities for both scale-up and scale-out applications across a diverse set of new and existing customers. We believe that our technical expertise and recognition as a market leader in networking places us in a solid position to continue to grow our portfolio. At the Open Compute Project Global Summit earlier this month, we announced the latest additions to our growing family of high-performance Ethernet switches as part of our HPS portfolio, the DS6000 and DS6001. The DS6000 series utilize Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 silicon and are designed to support port speeds of up to 1.6T with routing optimized for AI/ML workloads across both scale-up and scale-out networking. Notably, the DS6001 incorporates direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology. We anticipate availability later in 2026. These latest designs are a testament to our continuous innovation and our commitment to accelerating market advancements through technology leadership. We believe our optimism regarding our networking business is well founded. Our market share leading portfolio is supported by a number of company-specific and market-level tailwinds, which position us to continue to succeed in this fast-growing market. The latest forecast suggest that the TAM for high-bandwidth Ethernet networking is projected to reach $50 billion by 2029. Within this market, the 800-gig and higher segments are projected to grow even faster than the overall market at an impressive 54% CAGR driven by upgrade cycles led by hyperscalers and leading large language models' providers to keep pace with the demands of the latest AI workloads. Based on the engagement we've seen already, we think that the adoption of scale-up Ethernet is going to be a really meaningful opportunity and additive to the growing overall Ethernet TAM. In our case study earlier, we highlighted the increasing technical challenges with each successive new generation of networking technology, which we have proven highly capable of navigating. However, there are a number of additional highly favorable dynamics that we believe make this market an incredibly important opportunity. We'll touch on a couple of those now. One of the core challenges in building AI data centers is scaling of the infrastructure. While the increasing computational power of accelerators or nodes is driving requirements for greater bandwidth, a critical compounding dynamic is the nonlinear growth in connectivity required as the number of accelerators within a cluster scales. The largest fully operational cluster today is believed to consist of roughly 200,000 accelerators. However, commentary from leading silicon companies suggests that multiple hyperscalers plan to deploy clusters consisting of up to 1 million accelerators within the next couple of years. This rapid scaling in compute capacity required to support leading AI models requires huge increases in networking infrastructure, including high-bandwidth Ethernet switches, which comprise the majority of our communications portfolio. The build-out of AI data centers is fundamentally shifting the share of spend towards back-end networking, which is expected to grow more than twice as fast as front-end spending. Back-end networking connects the compute clusters used for training models, while front-end connects the network to the external world, primarily for inference traffic. The unique demands of back end align with our competitive strengths, in particular, more intense performance requirements where factors like high bandwidth, low latency and sustained high utilization are an absolute necessity. The back end also necessitates shorter refresh cycles required for the network to keep pace with the increases in computational power. Since our switch revenues are predominantly comprised of back-end shipments, we have meaningful exposure to the highest growth segment of the market. Our customers tend to be early adopters, and we help them accelerate their deployments of the newest switching platforms early on in upgrade cycles. This is reflected in our leading market share on the highest bandwidth and Ethernet switching for the data center across each of 200-gig, 400-gig and 800-gig platforms. Today, our cumulative market share across all of these speeds as measured by total ports shipped is 41%, more than double the next largest competitor's volume. As the technical complexity rises with each generation of the technology, designing high-performance switches becomes increasingly challenging and fewer and fewer competitors can do it effectively. Managing this complexity and helping customers achieve speed to market with new technologies are what we really excel at, allowing us to secure the strongest share in the earliest stages of every new upgrade cycle. We see custom solutions for high-performance AI networking platforms being widely adopted by our leading hyperscaler customers. This model offers the benefits of vendor diversity, cost effectiveness and highly tailored solutions, which become more pronounced as their infrastructure deployments scale. Consequently, we believe hyperscalers and increasingly large digital native customers will continue to leverage these solutions. In this segment of the overall market, Celestica's share leadership is even more pronounced as we account for the majority of the total spend, 55%, having grown our share meaningfully over the last couple of years. Securing mandates and consistently executing on high complexity customized solutions for the largest customers in the industry reflects our competitive advantage and continues to validate our market strategy. Moving on to our enterprise market, which includes our AI/ML compute and storage businesses. Our portfolio revenue is projected to be about $2 billion in 2025, and we expect to see meaningful growth in 2026, significantly exceeding our previous peak revenues from 2024, as we ramp the next-generation AI/ML compute program. Looking further ahead, 2027 is expected to be another transformative year as we plan to ramp production for the rack-scale custom AI system with a digital native customer. The design work for this program is well underway, and we expect to receive initial XPU deliveries in the second half of 2026 to support early test deployments with full-scale production expected to commence in 2027. The scale and scope of the custom solution, including design, manufacturing, orchestration and deployment for a leading-edge system of this nature is incredibly complex. But as we've highlighted, these are the kinds of challenging engagements where Celestica truly thrives. We anticipate this program will serve as a landmark proof point, showcasing our full suite of system-level capabilities. Shifting to the market outlook, the TAM for accelerated compute is expected to grow to nearly $500 billion by 2029. Some of the tailwinds driving this growth are particularly favorable for our business. Given that our compute business is focused almost exclusively on solutions supporting custom ASIC platforms, we are positioned to benefit from the highest growth segment of the AI server market. Overall, the constraints on capacity we spoke about earlier, currently being experienced at the largest hyperscaler and digital native customers continue to highlight the clear requirement for more compute infrastructure and the strong demand in this market. As mentioned, Celestica's market strategy is focused almost exclusively on the custom ASIC segment, which is forecasted to grow roughly sixfold over the next several years. An increasing number of the largest data center players in the market continue to pursue development of custom ASIC platforms, and we are seeing this trend within our own customer base. The architectures of these chips are designed to be optimized to support a customer's specific workloads with the intention to deliver lower hardware cost, power savings and overall better price to performance than a general-purpose GPU. As AI models become more highly specialized, custom silicon architectures will also be an increasingly important means to enable differentiation and performance between models. And as compute infrastructures grow and scale, the benefits to deploying a custom ASIC platform successfully are magnified. Because custom ASICs also require highly tailored bespoke systems to be designed around the silicon, customers often require greater support from solutions providers, presenting us with better opportunities for value-added engagement on engineering and design. We believe this fast-growing segment of the market better lends itself to our competitive strengths in customization and managing complexity and that there are fewer players that have our track record in supporting these kinds of platforms at scale. We are exceptionally optimistic about the future of our CCS business. We have confidence in our outlook, supported by visibility to upgrade cycles, strong customer demand forecasts and a robust pipeline of potential new opportunities. And we feel that we are in a prime position to capture the incredible market opportunities in front of us. With that, I would now like to hand the call over to Todd, who will take you through the latest in our ATS segment.