MaxLinear, Inc. Common Stock Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Greetings. Welcome to the MaxLinear second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Leslie Green, investor relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, Paul.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss MaxLinear's second quarter 2026 financial results. Today's call is being hosted by Dr. Kishore Seendripu, CEO, and Steven Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. After our prepared comments, we will take questions. Our comments today include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements relating to our guidance for the third quarter of 2026, including revenue, GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin, GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses, GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense, GAAP and non-GAAP income taxes, and GAAP and non-GAAP diluted share count.

In addition, we will make forward-looking statements relating to trends, opportunities, execution of our business plan, and potential growth and uncertainties in various product and geographic markets, including, without limitation, statements concerning the future financial and operating results, opportunities for revenue and market share across target segments, new products, including the timing of production and launches of such products, demand for and adoption of certain technologies, and our total addressable market. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including risks outlined in the risk factors section of our recent SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30th, 2026, which we filed today. Any forward-looking statements are made as of today. MaxLinear has no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

The second quarter of 2026 earnings release is available in the investor relations section of our website at maxlinear.com. In addition, we report certain historical financial metrics, including, but not limited to, gross margin, income or loss from operations, operating expenses, interest and other expense, and income tax on both GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We encourage investors to review the detailed reconciliation of our GAAP and non-GAAP presentations and the press release available on our website. We do not provide a reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance for future periods because of the inherent uncertainty associated with our ability to project certain future changes, including stock-based compensation and its related tax effects, as well as potential impairments. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed today are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable GAAP financial measures.

We are providing this information because management believes that it's useful to investors as it reflects how management measures our business. Lastly, this call is also being webcast, and the replay will be available on our website for two weeks. Now let me turn the call over to Dr. Kishore Seendripu, CEO of MaxLinear. Kishore? Thank you, Leslie, good afternoon, everyone.

Our Q2 financial results highlight the exciting inflection in our business trajectory and the beginning of a multiyear growth phase for MaxLinear. Overall revenue grew 55% year-over-year, reflecting strong execution, accelerating adoption of our newest data center products, improving visibility, and gathering momentum in our infrastructure portfolio. With the improvement in profitability in the quarter, we also returned a positive GAAP EPS of $0.02. In addition, with the favorable product mix shift towards our infrastructure business, we are now forecasting Q3 2026 non-GAAP gross margin to be 60% at the midpoint of our guidance range, as well as a substantial increase in our non-GAAP profitability. Infrastructure is now our largest revenue category and grew 145% year-over-year, driven by robust production ramps in optical data center-oriented platforms.

Based on robust customer orders and rising visibility of program ramps, we are once again raising our expectations for 2026 optical data center revenue to be between $210 million-$230 million, with continued growth as run rates expand into 2027. Keystone, our 100 gigabit per lane, five-nanometer CMOS PAM4 DSP and SerDes technology, continues to ramp into high volume production at major hyperscale customers across U.S. and Asia for 400 gig and 800 gig deployments. Delivering almost 40% lower consumption in power than competition, Keystone success serves as the foundation for multi-generational customer engagements that extend to the adoption of next generation 1.6 terabit and 3.2 terabit optical scale-up and scale-out architectures at 200 gigabit and 400 gigabit per lane speeds respectively.

We expect Rushmore, our 1.6 terabit optical PAM4 DSP at 200 gigabit per lane speeds, to become an important optical connectivity growth driver beginning in 2027, which will layer on top of Keystone's successful ongoing ramp. Beyond our PAM4 SerDes technology, we have comprehensively expanded our portfolio for optical and electrical scale-up and scale-out connectivity opportunities, including TIAs, drivers, and onboard retimers. Together, these products support a broad range of data center architectures consisting of pluggable optics, LRO, LPO, NPO, NCPO, providing customers with greater flexibility in their deployment of next generation AI and cloud infrastructure using MaxLinear solutions. Washington, our standalone 200 gigabit per lane TIA platform, not only pairs seamlessly with Rushmore, but it can also be deployed standalone in LPO and NPO implementations that do not require a DSP.

As the performance requirements for TIAs and drivers increase significantly at 200 and 400 gigabit per lane speeds, our deep SerDes expertise enables us to drive compelling performance advantages for such customer solutions. Annapurna, our 200 gigabit per lane Ethernet retimer platform, targets 1.6 terabit active electrical cable and onboard retimer requirements for scale-up in AI systems requiring low latency, short reach electrical interconnects within server racks and switches. Annapurna's onboard retimer applications expand our presence into another critical layer of AI infrastructure. For both Annapurna and Washington, we expect initial revenue in 2027, followed by a more meaningful volume ramp in 2028. Outside of optical, our first XGS-PON hyperscaler design win for dedicated data center control plane architectures has completed qualification for a 2027 ramp and beyond.

Additionally, we have secured design wins for USB bridge controllers at two major hyperscalers for AI rack management, alongside our broader analog and power management portfolio. These wins broaden our engagement across the data center platform and strengthen our strategic positioning with key customers. Our Panther family of storage accelerators addresses CPU memory and storage bottlenecks. We expect revenues from Panther to roughly double this year, with the potential to nearly double again in 2027. Outside the cloud data center, we expect edge AI-driven upgrades to 5G wireless LAN access and transport infrastructure to increase demand for our single chip Sierra 5G radio SoC and our millimeter and microwave wireless backhaul RF and MODEM solutions in the mid to long term.

Moving to broadband and connectivity, both categories delivered revenue growth in Q2, driven by large scale deployments of our single chip fiber PON and Wi-Fi 7 gateway platforms at major tier 1 service providers in North America and Europe. We are also in the early stages of Ultra DOCSIS 3.1 and 4.0 deployments, which will provide additional stability to growth as ramps progress throughout 2027 and 2028. In summary, we are pleased with our first half performance and the momentum we have in our data center business. Keystone has established MaxLinear as a proven high volume, high quality supplier of 400 gigabit and 800 gigabit PAM4 DSPs and SerDes technology. At the same time, our Rushmore, Washington, and Annapurna active electrical cable and retimer platforms extend our reach into 1.6 terabit optical and next generation AI infrastructure.

With multiple revenue drivers layering on over the next two years, we believe MaxLinear is exceptionally well positioned for sustained transformative growth and increasing long-term shareholder value. With that, let me now turn the call over to Steven Litchfield, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Corporate Strategy Officer. Steve? Thanks, Kishore. Total revenue for the second quarter was $168.8 million, up 23% from $137.2 million in the previous quarter, and up 55% from the $108.8 million in the second quarter of 2025.

Infrastructure revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was approximately $85 million. Broadband revenue grew to approximately $45 million. Connectivity revenue was approximately $24 million, and industrial and multi-market revenue was approximately $15 million. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter were 57.8% and 59.5% of revenue. The delta between GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin in the second quarter was primarily driven by $2.5 million of acquisition-related intangible asset amortization. Second quarter GAAP operating expenses were $101.8 million, and non-GAAP operating expenses were $62.8 million.

The delta between GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses was primarily due to stock-based compensation and performance-based equity accruals of $36.5 million combined, and acquisition-related costs and other costs of $2.2 million. GAAP loss from operations for Q2 was 2%, and non-GAAP income from operations in Q2 was 22% of net revenue. GAAP and non-GAAP interest and other expense during the quarter was $2.4 million and $2.3 million, respectively. GAAP EPS for Q2 2026 was $0.02 per share, marking a return to GAAP profitability. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.35 per share. In Q2, net cash flow provided in operating activities was approximately $4.8 million. We exited Q2 of 2026 with approximately $93.7 million in cash equivalents, and restricted cash.

This included a substantial prepayment of wafer supporting rising demand for our data center products, for which we have increasing order backlog in the second half of the year and into 2027. Our day sales outstanding in Q2 was approximately 28 days versus 27 days in the previous quarter, and our days of inventory was down in the quarter from 128 days to 123 days. This concludes the discussion of our Q2 financial results. With that, let's turn to the guidance for Q3 of 2026. We currently expect revenue in the third quarter of 2026 to be between $210 million and $220 million. Looking at Q3 by end market, we expect to see growth from all four of our business segments, with particular strength in infrastructure driven by data center optical interconnects.

We expect third quarter GAAP gross margin to be approximately 57%-60%, and non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 58.5% and 61.5% of revenue. We expect Q3 2026 GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $98 million to $104 million. We expect Q3 non-GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $66 million to $71 million. We expect our Q3 GAAP and interest and other expense to be in the range of approximately $3.8 million to $4.2 million. We expect our Q3 non-GAAP and interest and other expense to be in the range of approximately $3.7 million to $4.1 million. We expect a $1.5 million tax provision on a GAAP basis and a non-GAAP tax provision of approximately $1 million. We expect our Q3 GAAP and non-GAAP diluted share count to be approximately 99 million each.

In summary, our results this quarter reflect the continued strength of our optical products and the momentum we are seeing across multiple growth vectors within our infrastructure business. Our growth and innovation in this area has been transformational, and we believe we are in the early stages of a multiyear cycle characterized by revenue growth and expanding operating leverage. We're excited about the opportunities ahead and confident in our ability to create long-term shareholder value. With that, we'd like to open up the call for questions. Paul? Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session.

If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we call for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Tore Svanberg with Stifel.

Yes, thank you, and congratulations on the strong results. Kishore or Steve, you raised the optical transceiver revenue by more than $50 million for this year. Could you talk a little bit about what's driving that? Maybe talk a little bit about the regional nature of that, also if you could give us a sense for the mix between 400G and 800G. Thank you. Okay. Kishore, would you like to maybe take that one?

Yes. Tore, thank you. We're obviously very excited about the growing infrastructure business, and especially about our success with our ramps for 400G, 800G optical PAM4 business. As we entered the year, we were more concentrated at 400G revenues, but all the revenue growth we are seeing now is driven by 800G PAM4 success for us, and this will continue to 2027. As we move later into 2027, our 1.6 terabit Rushmore will start to generate revenue and will drive growth beyond 2027 to 2028 and 2029. Yes, 800G is now substantially going to be a bigger portion of our run rate revenues moving forward. With regard to our end customers, we do not share our particular customer names. We have not done that. However, our customers span both U.S. and Asia, our hyperscalers and tier 1 data center customers and OEMs.

At this point in time, we are beginning to see more and more traction and revenue growth that will span both the regions, including the United States.

Very good. As my follow-up, just thinking about some of the extension of products that you're now sampling, whether it's Washington, Annapurna. You talked about 2027 contribution. I'm just curious, should the ramp be mainly in 2028, or could you potentially start to see some ramps with TIAs and retimers already in 2027?

Our Rushmore product line, our Annapurna, and even our TIAs for the 1.6 terabit or 200 gigabit per lane speed has been sampling now. It's in the customer qual phases and designing process. We expect revenue to start generating in 2027. We expect the ramps at one or two opportunities to start somewhere in the second half of the year, and then layer on top of that through 2028 and 2029. Yes, we do have some expectations of 1.6 terabit revenues and for the TIA as a companion, and for Annapurna active electrical cables in 2027.

Sounds good. I'll go back in line. Thank you. Our next question is from Cody Acree with The Benchmark Company.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the strong results and guidance. Maybe if I could just get one point of clarification, the increase in the optical outlook, the $50 million increase, that is all just Keystone, is that correct? That's not counting any Washington or Annapurna revenue in 2026?

That's correct, Cody. That's very correct. It's all driven by Keystone product family.

Can you just talk about the visibility you have to that? The order visibility, the backlog builds that's looking into the second half.

Yes. Can you just give us some color on the extension of your order trends?

Yeah, Cody. I can answer that one. Look, I think this probably goes without saying, but kind of across most of our businesses right now, the visibility is very good. Given some of the tight supply and just the continued increasing demand, visibility's good. It's going out on or about six months anyway. Naturally, that gives us the confidence to go and raise these numbers.

Thanks for that, Steve. Then just lastly, can you talk about wafer prepayments, maybe the amount that you did in Q2 and any expectation for Q3? I guess, if you can just walk through some of the puts and takes for your gross margin improvement. Things like your mix and your incremental supply constraints and any kind of expedite fees that you may be paying.

Sure. Yeah, not a problem at all, Cody. Maybe just hit the prepayment real quick. Certainly, with this increased demand and some of the making sure that we're securing wafers and products for our customers going out, we've certainly started to prepay in a lot of cases. That was up a little bit in the quarter. We expect that to continue next quarter as well. That's all against a product that has a backlog out a couple of quarters, right? Comfortable with that. Your question with regard to gross margins. A little ahead of schedule here. We're excited about hitting the 60% level in our guidance for Q3. As you're probably aware, the mix of our infrastructure products historically has been well above the corporate average. That continues to be the case today.

I do see that continuing to expand over the next year or two as our infrastructure business grows, as our 800 1.6T products start to contribute further. We've been a little bit cautious. We've shared this with investors that just the input cost, the wafer cost increases, the packaging test increases that we're seeing out there, we're certainly careful as we're seeing this across the board. Some cases, you can pass this along to customers. We've just been a little bit cautious on this front, but certainly, we see improvements from here.

Thank you, guys. Steve, I just want to add, if you look at the revenue ramp we've had throughout 2026 and raised expectations, especially with the advanced nodes in 5-nanometer, Keystone is the only 5-nanometer SoC shipping in volume for the 100 gig per lane speeds.

At least we were the first ones. We have gotten our forecast kept going up. I must say that our foundry and OSAT partners have been incredibly supportive in making sure that we can meet the surging demand as our quals went through, and we have started landing more and more customer product ramps on our optical products. Yes, supply is tight, but I think having strong relationship and constant communications with our foundry partners and OSATs has been incredibly helpful, and that goes a long way in meeting our demand.

Excellent. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Cody.

Our next question is from Joseph Quattrocchi with Wells Fargo.

Yeah, thanks for taking the questions. Maybe on the optical side on the revenue guide up, how should we think about the revenue run rate of that in the second half as we're just thinking about the trajectory into 2027?

Sure, Joe. Look, as new quals come through, production ramps start, we started out with a great run rate going into the year. I think that's just continued to improve. Obviously, raising this number here sets expectations for 2027 as well. You would expect that there's not a Stairstep. We continue to see as more customers' qualifications get completed, move into production volumes, you're seeing those numbers go up, and I would expect that to continue into next year.

Thanks. Maybe on the broadband side, maybe just any update there in terms of what you're seeing from a demand perspective and just some of the timing for some of these transitions. Has anything changed there? Yeah.

Not a whole lot of changes. As you know, we've been gaining share on some of our PON programs. That's gone exceptionally well this year. I think as we look out the back half of this year and next year, telco CapEx spend continue to be good. Our customers continue to be rolling out, in a lot of cases, new programs. If you recall, we've got content increases and a couple of other things. Yeah, I would say everything's on track on that front.

Thank you. Thanks, Joe. Our next question is from Suji Desilva with ROTH Capital Partners.

Hi, Kishore. Hi, Steve. Congratulations on the strong progress here. I know you're growing very strong in optical in 2026, but I'm trying to understand 2027 a little bit. Just what's the share opportunity, Kishore, as Rushmore upgrades happen from Keystone? Do you guys have an advantage there to perhaps even grow your share, or should we expect that it holds from the success you have in Keystone?

Sujit, obviously, the kind of growth we are seeing comes from two factors, right? The market itself is growing very, very strongly, and the fact that we have raised our expectation by 2026 revenue, which means a higher run rate, expectations getting towards second half and of 2026, which has implications for 2027 as well. It's a matter of as and when we learn about the ramps and how strong the ramps are, we are upgrading our revenue expectations. It's happening in both ways, right? One is through the TAM growth and the other one is through market share growth. Yes, on both fronts, our performance differentiation and increasing traction with successful rollout of our products and various other customers is having a knock-on effect of more, what I call, more acceleration in the ramps that we are seeing.

With regards to Rushmore, obviously Keystone is the foundational product for MaxLinear. This is the first major one that went to mass rollout from MaxLinear's point of view, even though it represents our third generation of technology. Rushmore, at 1.6 terabit, is now sampling. It's got performance and power advantages that are very, very substantial, and at the same time, it has also got a supply chain diversification that is very unique with MaxLinear versus our competition. If you roll in all these factors, we feel very optimistic and actually, frankly, very excited about Rushmore and the upside potential of ASP increases with the enhanced speeds. I think that the same customers that are using Keystone are eagerly working towards deploying our 1.6 terabit.

Obviously the qual interrupt cycle is a bit longer and natural at higher speeds, but we feel we're very well positioned to be successful with 1.6 terabit Rushmore as well as a successor to Keystone offering. The important thing is my own forecast for the industry is both 800 gigabit and 1.6 terabit will be one of the workhorse speed nodes for a long time to come. Even as Rushmore ramps, Rushmore comes online, Keystone will still be having a lot of growth engine and capacity moving forward.

Okay. Great. Thanks. My other question is on the TIA driver market, the Washington product and so forth. In the 1.6T platforms, are you seeing more creative set of CPO, LPO architectures that drive higher attach rate and make better use of your products as they break out some of the components there?

No. I think you have to look at that for the first time we are actually positioning and marketing Washington as both a standalone TIA and paired with Rushmore. Obviously, the first success we'll have is as a paired offering with our own SerDes and PAM4 DSP, namely Rushmore. Having said that, as we go to higher speeds, our deep product expertise is very, very valuable and differentiated, and it's got a lot of potential to be used as a standalone product working with other DSPs, and at the same time being designed into LPOs and LRO type of applications. At this stage, I would say it's preliminary. We expect our first traction to come from our own pairing with our own device.

Okay. Very helpful color, Kishore. Thanks. Our next question is from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company.

Hey, Steve and Kishore. I'll offer my congratulations as well. Wanted to follow up on Sujit's question just on Rushmore. As you look at the qualification programs you're engaged in now, is that a sort of expanding set or expanding opportunity? Do you think you are sort of going after more 1.6T modules at your customers than, say, you were originally looking at on 800 gig? I'm just kind of wondering, can you tell from the qualification activity whether you think your share continues to increase with Rushmore?

Wow. Very, very good question, and I'm actually very pleased with where we are. From where we started in Keystone, today I can safely say we are now comprehensively designing across the board of all of the optical module players on the 800 gigabit solution across the board. In a sense, 1.6 terabit now has to systematically get designed with each of those customers where we have laid the foundations with Keystone and them developing their modules, qualing them, and then interoping them. If anything, Keystone has created the footprint for us to roll out 1.6 terabit. Obviously, it's a very multifaceted play in terms of qualing 1.6 terabit Rushmore, and it's just being designed in with the module makers. It leads to the next phase of quals with the data center operators, and that's when the revenue ramps would start.

We expect this to happen towards the second half of next year and with some initial revenue ramps starting in 2027.

Got it. Kishore, as you look at the broadband, sort of the CPE gateway business, and you talk to your customers, do those CPE boxes tend to use a fair amount of memory? Is the rising cost of memory causing any sort of delays in rollouts or perhaps slower units? Do you think that the CPE business is able to absorb the memory cost increases?

At this point in time, we have not seen on our solution platforms effects of memory as being a major driver in their decisions on using a product. If anything, we have been able to share gains because our solution actually integrates a lot. There are different implementations, different solutions used. Competition uses lot more external memory than we do, we actually save our customers a lot more money due to the integrated solution with on-chip memory and incorporated. We have not seen much impact with our customers. Obviously, they're absorbing the cost of the memory, and they're able to pass it on to their operator customers. There is some juggling going on, but at our own level, we have not seen any, what I call, real tangible impact on the volumes that we were expecting and forecasting for this year and looking into next year.

You have to keep in mind that the lead times are pretty long these days, so you get fairly strong visibility based on backlog and bookings.

Understood. Thank you, Kishore. Yep.

Thank you, Randy. Our next question is from Tim Savageaux with Northland Capital Markets.

Hey, good afternoon, and congrats as well, especially on the guide. Wow. My first question is kind of about that, which is, in terms of what you're seeing here, can you maybe try to be more granular between overall market growth uptick in unit volumes, broadly speaking, being a driver here versus share gain on MaxLinear's part maybe at the expense of capacity-constrained competitors. I don't know if there'd be another factor, but I'd love to have you weight those two in terms of what you're seeing in the step function here these couple of quarters and I'll follow up from there.

So look- Yeah. Go ahead, Steve.

Sorry. Go ahead, Steve. Yeah, no, I was just gonna say, I don't know that It's hard to break out.

I guess from our perspective, what we're confident and I think what we are seeing is that we are seeing more market share gains. Certainly, the market's growing nicely. We're seeing our share go up. I think part of the rationale from seeing our guidance go up is that we've been able to take additional market share. We're seeing that in the short term, and we think you'll also see that throughout next year as newer programs start to ramp.

Got it. Following up on the guidance, I guess would it be, I think it's about $45 million. Would it be fair or perhaps conservative to say the majority of that sequential growth is coming from optical in Q3?

Yeah, I guess I would just say that the majority of it's coming out of infrastructure, certainly. We're seeing growth across that end market, call it much more so than some of the others. The others are going up as we guided, but a lot of that growth is coming from infrastructure. Certainly, we upped our optical guide, so that number goes up as well.

Got it. When you talk about growth across the rest of the segments, I assume you're referring to sequential growth there, not year-over-year.

I was. Yeah, just reflecting the guidance.

Yeah. Yeah, that's correct, Tim.

Great. Last question for me. Looks like no 10% customers here, and I imagine the old broadband guys are kind of falling off the list. As we move forward, and you continue to ramp in optical, do you have the prospect of having one or more of these module guys as a 10% customer in the near future or in the future in general? Thanks. That's it for me.

Yeah. I think we've mentioned this before, Tim. Look, I think we've talked about being in a lot of customers. Kishore just mentioned it again as well. We've got a number of module guys, a number of data centers that we're supplying product into today. Over time, yeah, I do think you'll expect to see more concentration. I think that's well understood as we go into next year. I don't think that'd be surprising at all.

Great. Thanks very much. Our next question is from Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna.

Hi, guys. Congrats on the results. Apologize if this has been asked as I joined late. In terms of the customer composition, particularly moving forward for DSP, is there any movement in terms of the balance between hyperscalers versus module makers, and then also North America versus Eastern guys? Is it still incredibly broad-based?

Yeah. You might have just missed this question because it was just before you. We continue to see growth. Kishore mentioned in the prepared remarks that we're seeing growth out of both regions. From a geography standpoint, we're certainly seeing growth on both sides. As far as concentration itself, as mentioned previously, there's not a 10% customer. I do expect, as we've talked in the past, I think you'll see a little more concentration as we move forward. There's not tons of these customers. I think it will be understandable that you'll see some more concentration as we move forward.

Okay. Just to be clear, you don't have one marquee customer pushing. Is that correct? Again, we don't have a 10% customer.

It's a little broader base. You should expect there's a handful of customers that are going to drive the most volumes over the next, call it, six quarters.

Okay, perfect. As a follow-up, I think it's been some time since you've given some long-term metrics for the model more broadly. I think at one point in time, we talked about 65% gross margins. Do you have any sort of an update for your longer-term model, including what a path might look like to 65%? Does that still hold for you guys?

Yeah. I don't think the target has changed. We certainly feel like with the product mix, the end markets that we participate in, that that's still the right goal, and I think there's a path to certainly get there. Raised the number for our Q3 guide, goes up a little bit ahead of schedule, so that's good. I think that reflects just our infrastructure business in general, growing at a faster rate than some of the other end markets, and they do have gross margins that run ahead of the corporate average. Right now we're seeing lots of increases of cost, right? Whether it be on the wafer side or just test assembly packaging. Doing our best to pass some of those costs along. Where you're paying premiums in some cases, meeting customer demands.

We're paying a little bit more right now, I certainly think that there's a strong path to see continued growth out of our gross margins.

Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

Our next question is from Ananda Baruah with Loop Capital Markets.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Really appreciate it. Same for me, I apologize if this has been asked. I jumped on late as well. I guess the DSP question, sort of as you look out the next couple of years, guys, and you think about what the drivers of growth are, in any way to help us think about order of magnitude, sort of the growth comes from bigger customer participation, i.e., hyperscalers, versus price lift from going to 1.6T and 3.2, versus just broader growth in the marketplace. Any help there would be useful. Thanks. Kishore, you want to take that?

Yeah. Hey, Ananda. I think we answered that question too as best we could. It's going to take all of those factors to play in our growth expectation plans. There's going to be share growth. There is going to be TAM growth. There is going to be TAM unit growth. There's going to be ASP growth as you go to higher and higher speeds. At the same time, our footprint inside the data center is increasing. Now we are also offering a broad, comprehensive product portfolio of TIAs drivers. At the same time, for active electrical cables, we have our Annapurna offering. Also for onboard retimers, right? As that product portfolio expands and broadens, it can address a number of architectures that include CPOs, NPOs, LPOs, LROs. Other implementations both for optical and electrical scale-up and scale-out implementations.

It's going to take all of those. The good news is that the offering has become more comprehensive. We continue to work towards that to expand that family, if you will, of the larger footprint. We feel we are really making excellent progress getting these into the pipeline. Eventually they will result in multi-year revenue growth and expansion for MaxLinear.

Yeah, that's really helpful, Kishore. Thanks for that. That's really helpful. I guess a quick follow-up is. Maybe this also was talked to earlier on the call. I apologize if it was. Anything notable, either on the technical side of things or on the relationship side of things of note that sort of is helping you move the ball forward over the last 90 days, that we should be aware of? That would be useful context for us to be aware of. That's it for me. Thanks. On the DSP business. Thanks.

Look, every day matters, right? We are really building on the successful penetration ramp that is happening on Keystone. That itself is a self-reinforcing driver and force, actually. If you really look at the larger picture in the larger landscape today, with the track record of the millions of units of shipments and optical transceiver PAM4 DSPs, there are only three players right now. We are one of them. I think that track record is really important. Having the next generation offering with Rushmore. Expanding the product portfolio, all of this play a role into how things move around, how we build relationships. You also have to keep in mind that we are now not just talking about electrical and PAM4 optical offerings with TIAs and drivers, active electrical cables and onboard retimers.

We also have storage accelerators now in our portfolio that will get more and more important as this agentic AI becomes very important. The storage bottlenecks that prevent increasing the number of agents, right? That's very important, how we expand that. Hardware acceleration and compression is going to be very important to expand the agents and at the same time reduce the time to first token, which all involves lower latency and improving power consumption. I think we are also showing other parts to the portfolio, including our XGS-PON for control plane for the data centers. It's going to take a lot of stuff to put together to continue to expand our relationship with the end customers. If you look at our two big competitors, right? They're very large companies, and they have a lot to offer to our end customers as well.

It's going to take working away, chipping away with more offerings that we could be a full-blown comprehensive player in the data center infrastructure.

Great. Very helpful context. Really appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Kishore. Thank you.

Thanks, Ananda. Our next question is from Karl Ackerman with BNP Paribas.

Yes. Thank you. Two, if I may, I'm going to pivot a bit from the questions with respect to optical, which is well covered, and you've certainly done very well this quarter on that. Could you discuss some of the key drivers for your industrial and multi-market business into the second half of next year? I know you've mentioned it was going to grow sequentially into September. I ask because while this area has improved, you're still halfway from the run rate business you achieved in 2023, and that appears to be margin accretive for you. If we could just talk about the drivers of that could also drive revenue the second half into 2027 would be very helpful.

Yeah. Sure, Karl. I can take that. The industrial business has definitely been recovering. Last year was very weak. We've started to see, you're seeing nice year-over-year improvements this year. I think I would expect that to continue next year. You're starting to hear more of the industry itself starting to recover, so that's good. I think we've talked about this a little bit before. Some of this is driven, some of the China business, we're actually seeing good pricing improvements in that region. I would expect pricing as well as new products to contribute to that growth.

Got it. If I may have a follow-up. Within broadband, could you discuss the mix of revenue on fiber today? Whether you see that crossing over from cable broadband, is that something that can occur in 2027? Can you just talk about the growth prospects- Yeah Between fiber and cable within that would be helpful.

Thank you. Yeah. Good question, Karl.

Yeah, you're right. We've been talking about this. This is an area that is still relatively new. We're a relatively new player, but we've now won the top two guys in North America. The second guy's ramping this year on track, as we had talked about. It's definitely growing nicely, the PON business specifically. I would expect that to continue next year. It's hard to say when the crossover will be. I would guess 2027, but it may push out into 2028, frankly, because some of the upgrades that are happening in the DOCSIS world are also growing. We're seeing decent growth on both sides, and it's good to see the telcos kind of with some spending there.

Yep. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Karl.

Our next question is from Tore Svanberg with Stifel.

Yeah, thank you. Just had a follow-up, and I'll ask a question that has not been asked. Looking at the filing, looks like your purchase obligations went up about $40 million. You also have an other obligations item that I think went up even more than that, $45 million. Can you just explain a little bit, the difference between those two? You talked about obviously the wafer prepays and so on and so forth. I'm sure there's stuff you got to do on the back end as well, but yeah, any more color on the difference in those two? Obviously it's a pretty important increase in both items.

Yeah. Obviously the purchase obligations are probably the bigger takeaway. We did have some prepayments. With the stock price increase that we saw in the quarter, there was a handful of payroll accruals that had to be done as well, and that's a portion of it, with around stock comp. Again, the majority is the prepayments. As we had kind of talked about a little bit earlier, that portion obviously supporting growth in Q4 and into Q1 as those lead times, like we're starting to place orders now for Q1. That's the majority of those numbers and those commitments.

Got it. Last question. There was a little bit of discussion about the long-term model. You're going to be at 30% operating margin this quarter, or at least close to it. I know you've been here before, but how should we think about that sort of number now sort of being more the baseline going forward, especially in relation to your OpEx guidance?

Look, I don't want to guide beyond the quarter that we're in, I think you know our long-term goal is to be between 30% and 35% operating margins. You're absolutely right. Kind of headed in that direction. You can kind of see the model starting to move there pretty quickly. Profitability's good. We're seeing good growth next year on the top line. Gross margins are favorable from an OpEx standpoint. We'll see some increases in OpEx, definitely supporting the growth in these areas. As we've talked about, the operating leverage, I think, is compelling. It's exciting to kind of see. You're right, we've been here before. We want to continue to show this kind of long-term sustainability of these profit margins.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Appreciate it, Tore.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to Leslie Green for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Paul, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call. This quarter, we will be presenting at a number of financial conferences and virtual events. The details will be posted on the investor relations page of our website, and we look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you. This concludes today's conference.

You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you again for your participation.