Penguin Solutions Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
July 8, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Penguin Solutions reported Q3 revenue of $324 million, up 7.9% year-over-year, with non-GAAP gross margin of 31.7% and non-GAAP EPS of $0.47 (up 25%).
  • Positive Sentiment: The company reaffirmed its full-year revenue growth outlook at 17% and raised its non-GAAP diluted EPS guidance from $1.60 to $1.80 per share.
  • Positive Sentiment: Integrated Memory revenue climbed 24% sequentially to $130 million, supported by stable DRAM/NAND pricing and early production orders for CXL products.
  • Positive Sentiment: A $200 million investment from SK Telecom and expanding collaborations with SK Hynix are advancing AI data center infrastructure and high-value memory solutions.
  • Negative Sentiment: Optimized LED sales were modestly impacted by tariffs on China shipments, resulting in only slight sequential growth and a 4% year-over-year decline.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Penguin Solutions Q3 2025
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

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Operator

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending the Penguin Solutions third quarter fiscal year twenty twenty five earning results conference call. My name is Cameron, and I'll be your moderator for today. All lines will be recorded for questions. And I would now like to pass the conference to your host, Ms. Singer, Investor Relations.

Suzanne Schmidt
Suzanne Schmidt
Investor Relations at Penguin Solutions

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's earnings conference call and webcast to discuss Penguin Solutions' third quarter fiscal twenty twenty five results. On the call today are Mark Adams, Chief Executive Officer and Nate Olmstead, Chief Financial Officer. You can find the accompanying slide presentation and press release for this call on the Investor Relations section of our website. We encourage you to go to the site throughout the quarter for the most current information on the company.

Suzanne Schmidt
Suzanne Schmidt
Investor Relations at Penguin Solutions

I would also like to remind everyone to read the note on the use of forward looking statements that is included in the press release and the earnings call presentation. Please note that during this conference call, the company will make projections and forward looking statements, including but not limited to statements about the company's growth trajectory and financial outlook, business plans and strategy and existing and potential collaborations. Forward looking statements are based on current beliefs and assumptions, are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the risks and uncertainties reflected in the press release and the earnings call presentation filed today as well as in the company's most recent annual and quarterly reports. The forward looking statements are representative only as of the date they are made and except as required by applicable law, we assume no responsibility to publicly update or revise any forward looking statements. We also discuss both GAAP and non GAAP financial measures.

Suzanne Schmidt
Suzanne Schmidt
Investor Relations at Penguin Solutions

Non GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as a substitute for or superior to our GAAP results. We encourage you to consider all measures when analyzing our performance. A reconciliation of the GAAP to non GAAP measures is included in today's press release and the accompanying slide presentation. And with that, let me turn the call over to Mark Adams, CEO. Mark?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Thank you, Suzanne. I'd like to welcome all of you to our third quarter fiscal twenty twenty five Penguin Solutions earnings call. We are pleased with our Q3 financial results. Our revenue was $324,000,000 an increase of 7.9% compared to Q3 of fiscal year twenty twenty four. Non GAAP gross margins came in at 31.7%.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Non GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.47 a 25 increase year over year. We achieved non GAAP operating income of $38,000,000 up 15% from the prior year and we delivered non GAAP operating income margin of 11.9%. All in all, our Q3 results attest to our progress in transforming Penguin Solutions into a leader in high performance, high availability enterprise infrastructure solutions. We continue to see signs of early stage enterprise AI adoption across vertical markets such as financial services, energy, defense, education and neo cloud segments. As we have mentioned in the past, our belief is that the investment of AI pilot systems deployed throughout the industry in 2023 and 2024 would lead to growth in full production installs in 2025 and 2026.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

We are now seeing signs that we have entered the initial stages of that growth in corporate build outs at scale. Premium solutions helps customers manage the complexity of AI adoption by leveraging both our proven know how and advanced cluster build outs and our portfolio of hardware, software and managed services. We work with our customers to design, build, deploy and manage these environments with a focus on time to revenue and reliability, while also targeting the highest level of performance and availability. Our products and services are primarily marketed to hyperscalers, neo cloud service providers and Fortune 500 companies. Historically, we have sold directly to our end customers.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

However, we are also investing in channel partnerships that we believe will provide new opportunities for growth over the long term. The foundation of Penguin solution success is our expertise in large scale deployments, which has been developed over a twenty five plus year history implementing complex data center clusters beginning with our early days in high performance computing or HPC. Our expertise integrating advanced technologies such as power, cooling, AI compute, memory, storage and networking enable us to deliver high performance, high reliability enterprise infrastructure solutions for our customers. As we've mentioned at the beginning of our fiscal twenty twenty five, we have transitioned from providing a quarterly financial outlook to providing a full year financial outlook. We believe that a full year outlook provides a broader perspective of our business, especially with regards to AI infrastructure engagements where the timing of actual deployments and associated revenue recognition can be unpredictable and concentrated.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

This approach aligns well with our focus on long term strategic objectives. At the same time, we know that our stakeholders appreciate commentary on our progress each quarter and we will offer that today as well. On our Q2 fiscal year twenty twenty five call in April, we raised our full year revenue growth outlook from 15% to 17% at the midpoint. Today, are reaffirming that outlook. In addition, we are raising our full year non GAAP diluted earnings per share outlook from $1.6 to $1.8 per share at the midpoint.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

As a reminder, we have shared previously that revenue and profits are likely to be weighted more towards the first half rather than the second half of fiscal twenty twenty five. I'd like to now provide additional detail on our business segments. Our advanced computing revenue for the third quarter of fiscal twenty twenty five was $132,000,000 down compared to the prior quarter as expected. As we often highlight on our earnings calls, revenue recognition in advanced computing tends to be lumpy. This is due to factors like customer concentration, the timing of large project implementation for our major customers and the timing and discretionary nature of our customer renewals.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

The decline in Q3 when compared to the prior quarter was largely due to the timing of a major deployment at a large hyperscale customer where we recognized the revenue in our second quarter. That said, this quarter we had some exciting wins at our existing customers and closed five new customer bookings highlighted by wins in the federal, energy and biotech segments. We continue to see increased interest at enterprise customers as well as in Neo Cloud customer opportunities, exemplifying the increased investments being made in large scale AI infrastructure. Our core competency and successfully managing large scale AI infrastructure build outs helps customers accelerate their time to a live production environment. We believe our customers value our technology agnostic approach, which allows us to create a unique overall solution that meets their specific AI infrastructure needs.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Beyond our hardware building blocks, we are investing in the development of Penguin Ice Clusterware, a software platform that helps customers manage their infrastructure assets. Our Penguin solution service organization can assist companies in managing their post deployment operations supporting the high performance and high availability of their systems. Overall, we have seen growth in new customer bookings and have continued to expand our pipeline during the first three quarters of FY twenty twenty five. Integrated memory under the Smart Modular brand achieved $130,000,000 in revenue in Q3, up 24% compared to the prior quarter. We saw strong demand from our computing, networking and telecommunications customers.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Pricing in both DRAM and NAND appears relatively stable and inventory levels appear balanced at our major customers. We are optimistic about memory demand in the near term as large enterprises seek out higher performance and higher reliability memory to support both established workloads and new complex AI workloads. In line with this increasing demand for improved memory bandwidth and availability, we are seeing early adoption of our Compute Express Link or CXL family of products. Thanks in part to positive momentum and our customer qualification efforts, we have received early production orders of CXL from OEMs and an AI computing customer, which reinforces our optimism about CXL's appeal to new types of customers. From an R and D perspective, we are focused on products that enable higher bandwidth and larger memory access to and from a GPU via memory pooling.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

We continue to invest in the design of Smart's optical memory appliance or OMA with first product shipments targeted for late twenty twenty six, early twenty twenty seven. Given the importance of memory to the AI ecosystem, we feel confident that Smart Modular continue to play a key role fulfilling our customers' integrated memory requirements in the future. Optimize LED operates under the Cree LED brand. Cree's revenue came in at $62,000,000 up slightly compared to the prior quarter. Our top line was constrained during the second half of Q3 largely due to increased cost and uncertainty related to tariffs on products shipped out of our Weizhou, China facility.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Despite macro uncertainty in the LED market, we remain confident in our high performance product portfolio, our strong intellectual property and our cost effective capital light operating model. In December of twenty twenty four, we closed a $200,000,000 investment from SK Telecom. At the time, we explained that in addition to the investment, the opportunities to partner with SK Group and more specifically SK Telecom and SK Hynix could offer strategic commercial benefits as well. We are making progress with SK Telecom on opportunities related to their AI strategy including their AI data center infrastructure initiatives. The already strong relationship between SK Hynix and Smart Modular is evolving as we look at new ways to address markets with system level products in custom high value ad memory related segments.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Since our last call, there have been two other company developments that I would like to mention. First on June 26, we announced a refinancing that further strengthens our balance sheet by reducing our gross leverage and extending our overall debt maturity while establishing a $400,000,000 credit facility. Nate will provide more details in his comments. Second, on June 30, we completed the re domiciliation of Penguin Solutions Inc. From The Cayman Islands to The United States as a Delaware Corporation.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

While our past structure served us well, we look forward to being a U. S.-based company as we continue our transformation. In closing, I want to thank our team for delivering strong results during a time of macro uncertainty. For Q4, we remain focused on short term execution while also continuing to invest for longer term growth. Penguin's value proposition of solving the complexity of AI infrastructure for our customers positions us well to address the increasing market opportunity being created by enterprise adoption at scale.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Let me stop here and hand the call over to Nate, who will provide more color on our performance and outlook for the remainder of fiscal twenty twenty five.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Nate? Thanks, Mark. I will focus my remarks on our non GAAP results, which are reconciled to GAAP in our earnings release tables and in the investor materials on our website. Now let me turn to our third quarter results. Total Penguin Solutions net sales were $324,000,000 up 7.9% year over year.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Non GAAP gross margin came in at 31.7%, which was down year over year and up sequentially. Non GAAP operating margin was 11.9%, up 0.8 percentage points versus last year and non GAAP diluted earnings per share were $0.47 for the quarter, up 25% from Q3 last year. In the third quarter of fiscal twenty twenty five, our overall services net sales totaled $66,000,000 down 3% versus Q3 last year. Product net sales were $259,000,000 in the third quarter, up 11% versus the prior year. Third quarter net sales by business segment were as follows: Advanced Computing $132,000,000 or 41% of our total net sales and down 9% year over year Integrated Memory $130,000,000 which was 40% of our total net sales and up 42% year over year and optimized LED $62,000,000 or 19% of our total net sales and down 4% year over year.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Non GAAP gross margin for Penguin Solutions in the third quarter was 31.7%, down 0.6 percentage points year over year, driven primarily by a higher mix of Integrated Memory net sales compared to last year, partially offset by improved margin rate in Integrated Memory and Optimized LED. Gross margin was up 0.9 percentage points sequentially with higher margin rates in Advanced Computing partially offset by a higher mix of Integrated Memory net sales. Non GAAP operating expenses for the third quarter were $64,000,000 up 1% year over year and up 2% sequentially. Operating expenses as a percentage of net sales were down year over year driven by higher net sales volumes and stable spending levels. Non GAAP operating income was $38,000,000 up 15% year over year and down 22% versus last quarter.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

The combination of top line growth and operating expense discipline translated into a 0.8 percentage point increase in operating margin versus Q3 last year. This is our fourth consecutive quarter of non GAAP operating margin expansion year over year. Non GAAP diluted earnings per share for the third quarter of fiscal twenty twenty five were $0.47 up 25% versus the prior year and down 10% versus the prior quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $45,000,000 up 15% year over year. Turning to balance sheet highlights.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

For working capital, our net accounts receivables totaled $293,000,000 compared to $212,000,000 a year ago with the increase driven by higher sales volumes. Days sales outstanding came in at forty seven days, up from forty two days in the prior year quarter due to variations in sales linearity across the quarters. Inventory totaled $184,000,000 at the end of the third quarter, up from $177,000,000 at the end of Q3 a year ago due to higher sales volumes. Days of inventory were 36, down from forty four days a year ago, primarily due to the timing of receipt and shipments. Accounts payable were $272,000,000 at the end of the quarter, up from $192,000,000 a year ago, due primarily to higher sales volumes. Days payable outstanding was 50 compared to forty seven days last year due to the timing of purchases and payments.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Days Our cash conversion cycle was thirty days, an improvement of eight days compared to last year due to faster inventory turns. Consistent with past practice, days sales outstanding, days payables outstanding and inventory days are calculated on a gross sales and gross cost of goods sold basis, which were $563,000,000 and $468,000,000 respectively in the third quarter. As a reminder, the difference between gross and net sales is primarily related to our memory businesses, logistics services, which are accounted for on an agent basis, meaning that we only recognize the net profit on logistics services as net sales. Cash and cash equivalents and short term investments totaled $736,000,000 at the end of the third quarter, up $268,000,000 from Q3 last year and up $89,000,000 sequentially. The year over year fluctuation was due primarily to proceeds from the issuance of preferred shares and cash generated by the business.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Third quarter cash flows generated from operating activities totaled $97,000,000 compared to $80,000,000 generated from operating activities in the prior year quarter. The increase year over year was due primarily to improved working capital efficiency. We spent approximately $30,000,000 to repurchase 1,800,000.0 shares in the third quarter under our share buyback program. Since our initial share repurchase authorization in April 2022, we have used a total of $113,000,000 to repurchase 6,600,000.0 shares through Q3 of fiscal year twenty twenty five, and we have $37,000,000 remaining in our authorization. We did not make any debt prepayments in this past quarter, and the principal on our term loan was at $300,000,000 as of the end of the quarter.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Our net debt at the end of Q3 was negative $66,000,000 Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we completed a refinancing of our existing credit facility. We paid off the $300,000,000 remaining on our term loan using $200,000,000 of cash from our balance sheet and $100,000,000 of borrowings from a new revolving credit facility. This refinancing transaction significantly reduced our leverage, extended our debt maturities and is expected to reduce our debt service costs as we reduced our total growth debt by $200,000,000 For those of you tracking capital expenditures and depreciation, capital expenditures were $2,000,000 in the third quarter and depreciation was $5,000,000 Now turning to our outlook. Given our strong year to date performance, we are maintaining the midpoint of our net sales outlook for the year at 17% year over year and tightening the range to plus or minus two percentage points. By segment, our full year net sales outlook reflects the following.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

For Advanced Computing, we continue to expect full year net sales to grow between 1525% year over year. From memory, we now expect net sales to grow between 2530% year over year. And for LED, we continue to expect net sales to be approximately flat year over year. Our non GAAP gross margin outlook for the full year remains 31% with a tighter range of plus or minus 0.5 percentage points. We now expect our non GAAP operating expenses for the full year will be $260,000,000 plus or minus $5,000,000 We are also raising our outlook for our non GAAP full year diluted earnings per share, which is now expected to be approximately $1.8 plus or minus $05 This is up from our prior outlook of $1.6 plus or minus $0.10 And finally, our non GAAP diluted share count is now expected to be approximately 54,000,000 shares for the year.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Due primarily to changes in our geographic mix of our earnings, we are lowering our FY 2025 non GAAP tax rate to 25%, which reflects currently available information. While we expect to use this normalized non GAAP tax rate through 2025, the long term non GAAP tax rate may be subject to changes for a variety of reasons, including the rapidly evolving global and U. S. Tax environment, significant changes in our geographic earnings mix or changes to our strategy or business operations. Our outlook for fiscal year twenty twenty five is based on the current environment, which contemplates, among other things, the global macroeconomic environment and ongoing supply chain constraints, especially as they relate to our advanced computing and optimized LED businesses.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

This includes extended lead times for certain components that are incorporated into our overall solutions, impacting how quickly we can ramp existing and new customer projects and higher tariffs in our optimized LED business. We believe we are continuing to manage our operations in a prudent manner as we navigate a challenging environment while also investing in our long term growth. Please refer to the non GAAP financial information section and the reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP measures tables in our earnings release and the investor materials on our website for further details. With that operator, we are ready for Q and A.

Operator

Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press followed by 2. Again, to ask a question, The first question is from the line of Kevin Cassidy with Rosen Securities. You may proceed.

Kevin Cassidy
MD - Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

Yes. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the good results. And in particular, the five new customer bookings. I wonder if you could give us a little more details on that.

Kevin Cassidy
MD - Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

Are these customers that you got through partnerships? Maybe how long have been working on booking these new customers? And is it software and services or hardware or both? Maybe just a few questions about that.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Kevin. Thanks. It's Mark. Let me see if I can break this down for you. The length of these sales motions typically are in the twelve to eighteen month range from the time we engage a customer to the time we ship and the bookings kind of come somewhere around the twelve month mark.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

And I would say some of the new bookings were kind of along that framework. And you asked specifically about software and services relative to hardware. And we've mentioned on previous calls that the hardware is typically something that we recognize revenue upfront. And the way software and services, that category is recognized as more ratified over time. And so, when we get these bundled solutions, so to speak, these integrated solutions of hardware, software and services, they typically are hardware upfront and have characteristics of being lower margin in nature.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

And then the software and services come to us over time. And that's consistent with some of our more recent bookings.

Kevin Cassidy
MD - Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

Okay, great. And maybe you said a little bit about the SK Telecom collaboration as I mean, maybe generating new customers. Can you talk more about where where where you're seeing that? What geographies or what may be company?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Yes, absolutely. At the time of the investment, when we closed it back in December of twenty twenty four, we highlighted that this was really a relationship that was transcending the financial investment element of it. And we were excited about working with SK and more specifically SK Telecom and SK Hynix. We've had some early wins on the memory side and we look forward to broadening that relationship with Hynix over time, more system related products and helping enable some of their memory technologies to new application environments. We've talked about higher bandwidth opportunities like the OMA we mentioned.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

But we've actually had some early success on business opportunities with Hynix to date. We are making really good progress with SK Telecom as well. We are certainly very optimistic about the opportunities ahead with them in terms of AI data center infrastructure solutions. By the way, the efforts that we have there are really global in nature, not just domestic, but also in other parts of the world. And we're again, we're pleased about the progress we're seeing on their AI data center initiatives and we're exploring multiple joint opportunities with them.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

So overall, the relationship with SK is positive, and we're pleased with the progress.

Kevin Cassidy
MD - Senior Research Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities

Okay, great. Thanks for answering the question.

Operator

The next question is from the line of Tom O'Malley with Barclays. You may proceed.

Thomas O’Malley
Thomas O’Malley
Analyst at Barclays Capital

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. My first is on the memory side. I think that's the one segment that you're actually taking a bit higher for the full year. You saw some strong growth in the May, August for your full year guide is implied kind of down in the mid single digits range. Can you kind of talk about the dynamic of potential pull forwards?

Thomas O’Malley
Thomas O’Malley
Analyst at Barclays Capital

If we look at some other companies in ecosystem, you've seen some really strong consumer demand. In the most recent quarter, you didn't call that out, you kind of called out a broad breadth of strength, but do you know if you're seeing any pull forwards? Are you protecting against that with the guide in August? Any color there would be helpful.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Sure. And Tom, I think just one correction. I think if you said that memory was the only one that was growing in the year, did I misunderstand?

Thomas O’Malley
Thomas O’Malley
Analyst at Barclays Capital

No, you raised memory from, I think prior range for the full year, I think, moved a little higher from 25% to 30%. So you took that up

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

a Right. Little Okay. Yeah. And advanced computing is up in the range, I guess, it's 15% to 25%, I believe. So on the memory side, we are not seeing any necessary pull forward, so to speak.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

As we commented on back in the fall, there was some inventory that we were working through. And this quarter, I think we were really pleased with the growth opportunities as people started to get back in ordering. But we don't see any significant inventory builds or what have you. And yes, we watch that from a customer discussion standpoint on their ordering patterns and what their requirements are and their forecasts. And our pipeline in Q4 remains pretty healthy.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

We're generally very pleased with the direction of the business overall.

Thomas O’Malley
Thomas O’Malley
Analyst at Barclays Capital

Helpful. And then on the advanced computing side, historically, these are big projects, big customers. They tend to slide around one to two quarters, which is why I think the full year guidance is useful. But when you look at the fourth quarter, is the big acceleration again a timing of an order? Or are you seeing kind of broad based strength across different customers kind of implied in your full year guidance a nice mid teens growth sequentially into the August?

Thomas O’Malley
Thomas O’Malley
Analyst at Barclays Capital

So just trying to understand what's contributing to that strength in Q4?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

We're doing as we mentioned, we're seeing some uptick in terms of bookings, some of which will be looking to recognize the revenue through deployments by the end of the quarter. But this quarter isn't necessarily one major deployment. That's not what we're suggesting. We've got a little more diversity in the quarter, although I'll let Nate talk to the specific outlook. But this quarter is not like we commented on in Q2 earlier in my script.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

This is more a number of customers. And again, we run into the situation where the bookings come at a certain time, our supply chain goes out and acquires accordingly and we look to install and it's really done at the customer and our pace relative to the business we do with them and not necessarily to the end of a fiscal quarter. So this is where we run into that same lumpiness in terms of revenue. Having said that, as I want to reinforce, it's not about one customer per se, it's a little more diversified.

Operator

The next question is from the line of Samik Chatterjee with JPMorgan. You may proceed.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

Hey guys. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe if I can start on advanced computing and you talked about sort of the deployments for fiscal 4Q not being driven by like one lumpy deployment, but more broad based. But can you talk about the mix a bit in terms of what you're seeing in those incremental deployments? And I know you've talked about the new cloud opportunity, but any sense that you can give us in terms of what you're incrementally seeing in the mix sort of rotating more towards the neo clouds or any more visibility as you look forward into that? And I have a follow-up. Thank you.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Sure. I think, as I commented on earlier in my prepared comments, we've seen in addition to NeoCloud, we've seen some strength in federal and energy, had a win in biotech, and we're seeing a lot more inbound signals relative to interest in the financial sector, as well. Those are kind of the top segments that we're playing in today.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

Okay. Got it. Got it. And then maybe on the sort of I know it's too early to talk about the next fiscal year, but when you think about sort of the new customers that you've signed up that you talked about the five new customers as well as the opportunity that you're now seeing in the pipeline. Just help us think about maybe from a fiscal twenty twenty six perspective for advanced computing, what should we keep in mind relative to fiscal twenty twenty five, the growth rate that you have in that sort of 15% to 25% range, how should we think about what are the puts and takes for fiscal twenty twenty six?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Yes. Unfortunately, we're not providing any of that guidance today. It's just it's too dynamic an environment with all the puts and takes. There's a number of factors that we and other companies are dealing with right now. One good example is the tariff situation and how dynamic that changes over time.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Certainly, very happy and proud of the way the team navigated that in Q3 and delivered strong results. But we're going to stop from commenting on FY 2026 in any way shape or form today.

Samik Chatterjee
Samik Chatterjee
Managing Director, Equity Research Analyst at JP Morgan

Okay. No, appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you.

Operator

The next question is from the line of Nick Doyle with Needham. You may proceed.

Nick Doyle
Analyst at Needham & Company

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. First, could you give any details on the CDW agreement or partnership? Just maybe talking about how that approach is different than with Dell and if you expect any kind of similar contributions or customer type wins in fiscal twenty twenty six? Thanks.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Sure. Again, we're going to sorry, Nick, we're going to hold up on any 2026 commentary. But the framework that we're working on right now is we're starting to invest in partnerships outside of our direct customer engagement. And you've mentioned two of them today. The idea being that we can scale to a larger set of customers through some of these partnerships and really focus on our value add.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

And we've seen some early proof of concept success stories in both partners that you mentioned. But again, it's early stage and it's the right thing for us to be thinking about as we expand not just in terms of customers here in The U. S, but as we think about a broader go to market internationally.

Nick Doyle
Analyst at Needham & Company

Got it. And for my second question, services revenue grew quarter over quarter while overall advanced compute declined sharply. So was that driven more by these point in time services? Or did those larger hardware deals in the first half translate to this kind of slower steady revenue growth that we saw this quarter?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

I think that it's a mixture of everything what you just said. It is a mixture of service revenue ratified over time and recognized over multiple periods so to speak. And the mix of hardware in Q3 was lower than, say, Q2. And so the combination of that contributes to the services mix. As you know, we recognize services the way we do, but they are renewed annually.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

And then in the middle of the fiscal year, if we get a new order, we begin that recognition at the time of a shipmentsigned order for those services. And so, that's a positive and we continue to try to add to that quarter to quarter.

Operator

Thank The next question is from the line of Brian Chin with Stifel. You may proceed.

Denis Pyatchanin
Denis Pyatchanin
Equity Research Associate at Stifel Financial

Hi, this is Dennis on for Brian. Thanks for taking our questions. My first one is on advanced compute. So for the five new customers that you won, are you expecting any change in the hardware and software mix proportions over the life of these customers?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Well, typically what happens or what we've seen happen with our customer engagements with new customers is, again, the revenue recognition for the new customers upfront is hardware related, just because that's what we install and that's what we design a solution for. And then our services and software mix happens over time. Now, we've had a number of instances where customers increased the footprint of their rollout or of their implementation and that can be a time when they actually order more hardware along the way. But typically, flow of revenue recognition and type of product is hardware early on in the cycle of a new customer acquisition and software and services over time. And we continue to try to be very disciplined and making sure that we're not doing any hardware only deals.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

As you all can see from our competitor announcements without being specific, the hardware market itself is super competitive from a margin standpoint. And quite frankly, think our value add is in the services area, in the software and services that we offer our customers. And of course, our hardware is best in class from a design and performance standpoint, but the hardware market tends to be lower in gross margin. And thus, we tend to propose and look at our business from a solutions mindset, not in any one component of hardware only sales.

Denis Pyatchanin
Denis Pyatchanin
Equity Research Associate at Stifel Financial

Would you say that the majority of this $66,000,000 of software services sales comes from advanced computing? Or is there a good bit from the other segments too?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

A majority of the services, like a healthy majority. I'll let Nate see if he can give me the actual number here, but the majority of services is all advanced computing.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Yeah. The great majority. Got a little bit in memory, but it's really mostly advanced compute.

Denis Pyatchanin
Denis Pyatchanin
Equity Research Associate at Stifel Financial

Great. And then for my second question, so for memory, could you discuss the strength in this quarter from a product and a vertical perspective? And like how does the strength in DRAM pricing impact your memory gross margins? And then maybe you could also talk about the attach rate of your memory products to your advanced computing products?

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Okay. So the first, the pricing in DRAM has been relatively stable in the quarter. What I would say is the memory gross margin question, ironically, when memory pricing goes up, the gross margins are impacted slightly in a negative way because DRAM then becomes a higher percentage of the whole value add that we give. But it's just a directional trend, but the mix of products and the unit growth was substantial as well in the quarter, which led to a combined high growth quarter in memory. On the attach rate, we continue to work and use Smart Modular and the Penguin platform that we do sell.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

And we're continuing to develop on new products that we think will be very valuable in terms of the AI ecosystem as we've talked about CXL and our optical memory appliance development, which is a long term initiative for us to help provide better memory, advanced memory solutions for advanced workloads. So it priority is of ours and we do a good job on the Penguin systems itself and we're looking to develop more sophisticated higher bandwidth memory and products going forward.

Denis Pyatchanin
Denis Pyatchanin
Equity Research Associate at Stifel Financial

That's it for me. Thank you.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Thank you.

Operator

Last For question, we have a follow-up from Nick Doyle with Needham. You may proceed.

Nick Doyle
Analyst at Needham & Company

Hi. Thank you. Just kind of a bigger picture question. We're hearing about this idea of production inference, and and I think that really requires us truly tier one grade high availability, you know, server solutions. So if you take out the hyperscalers just because that's not where you generally play, how much market capacity today is operating at that level and and kinda ready to service production inference?

Nick Doyle
Analyst at Needham & Company

And how much is left where you guys can go in and really increase that utilization, get the high availability ready to go? Thanks.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Not sure I Nick, I'm not sure I totally understood your question. We have a high availability edge server platform that we use. We've talked about developing products for inferencing over time. In the data center, we're starting to see more of the trend line to be a hybrid training and inferencing demand thesis. But I'm not sure again if I'm quite getting your question. Can you restate it?

Nick Doyle
Analyst at Needham & Company

Yeah. Just pointing out that when guys want to do this kind of production level inference, there's this thinking that it really requires high availability versus more traditional cloud. And and to do that, you know, you need a a higher level server, and and that's what you guys can provide. So maybe the market just isn't there, and then you can kinda help the market move towards a solution that, you know, works for everybody and wonder Great. How much

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Got it. So I understand. I apologize. I misunderstood because we when you said inferencing, I initially went to our Edge platform and what we're trying to build for future Edge implementations. But in the environment you're talking about, you're exactly right.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

There's and by the way, that's a lot that has to do with our software and services that we provide to be able to make sure that not only is the design performance we get upfront in our systems critical, but it's also the availability and uptime through diagnostics and fault repair capabilities in the data center that allow us to have the maximum uptime. And that's a really critical metric when you think about the capital investments into AI infrastructure, making sure people have high reliability, high availability along with the high performance. And quite frankly, when you come from a high performance compute background like us, we've seen the levers that allow for the most optimal performance in a data center. And I think that has played well and will continue to play well for us as true enterprise rollout production environments for inferencing.

Nate Olmstead
Nate Olmstead
SVP & CFO at Penguin Solutions

Thanks, Mark. Thank you.

Operator

That concludes the Q and A session. I would now like to pass the conference back over to Mark Adams, the CEO for any closing remarks.

Mark Adams
Mark Adams
President & Chief Executive Officer at Penguin Solutions

Thank you, operator. And just in closing, we are pleased with our results through the third quarter. On today's call, we reconfirmed the midpoint of our revenue guidance, which we raised to 17% on our last call. And we raised today our earnings per share guidance range for fiscal twenty twenty five. We have strengthened our balance sheet and remain committed to our long term investments in hardware, software and services, positioning us to address the rapidly growing market demand for AI infrastructure solutions on premise, in the cloud and at the edge. Thank you all for joining today's call.

Operator

That concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation and enjoy the rest of your day.

Executives
    • Suzanne Schmidt
      Suzanne Schmidt
      Investor Relations
    • Mark Adams
      Mark Adams
      President & Chief Executive Officer
    • Nate Olmstead
      Nate Olmstead
      SVP & CFO
Analysts
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