Blaize Q1 Earnings Call Highlights

Key Points

• Blaize reaffirmed its full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $130 million despite a Q1 revenue miss caused by HBM-related server shortages and a delayed NeoTensr order. Management said demand remains strong and expects the quarter’s shortfall to be a timing issue rather than a change in outlook.
• Partnership momentum is a major growth driver, especially the expanded NeoTensr deal, which now has a potential total value of about $70 million, plus new agreements with Winmate and Nokia. Blaize said these deals support deployment across Asia-Pacific and other markets, with large portions of revenue expected in the second half of 2026.
• Blaize is pushing recurring AI Services revenue alongside hardware sales, starting with face recognition and other applications that can be monetized through APIs. The company also raised $35 million in equity, extending its cash runway into mid-2027 while it works to reduce reliance on HBM-heavy systems.

Blaize NASDAQ: BZAI executives said the company remains on track for its full-year 2026 revenue target despite a first-quarter revenue shortfall tied to constrained availability of AI servers using high-bandwidth memory.

Chief Executive Officer Dinakar Munagala said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call that Blaize “came off a breakout growth year in 2025” and expects 2026 to continue that trend, citing new contracts and partnerships across Asia-Pacific, Europe and other markets. First-quarter revenue was approximately $2.7 million, which Chief Financial Officer Harminder Sehmi said was up 170% year over year and in line with the company’s April 14 pre-release.

Management attributed the first-quarter result to an industrywide shortage of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, that limited server availability from one supplier and delayed orders from NeoTensr. Sehmi said Blaize now expects to fulfill more than $11 million in orders to NeoTensr during the second quarter.

“This is about a timing issue,” Sehmi said. “Customer demand remains strong.” He added that more than 70% of revenue billed to NeoTensr in the fourth quarter of 2025 has been collected to date.

Guidance Reaffirmed Despite Back-Half Weighting

Blaize reaffirmed its full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $130 million. Sehmi said the company continues to expect revenue to be “back half-weighted” as large orders and data center opportunities develop. The company also maintained its adjusted EBITDA loss guidance of $45 million to $50 million for the year.

Gross margin in the first quarter was 58%, up from 11% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Sehmi said the improvement reflected a mix shift toward higher-margin software and Blaize-powered hardware, as well as the delay of the HBM-intensive NeoTensr order into the second quarter. He cautioned that blended gross margins are expected to be compressed over the next two quarters because of a higher portion of third-party hardware in the revenue mix. By the fourth quarter, the company expects blended gross margins to exceed 30% as it transitions toward more inference servers and recurring software revenue.

Blaize reported a first-quarter net loss of $22.7 million, compared with a net loss of $147.8 million in the year-earlier period. Sehmi said the prior-year quarter included significant non-cash items and one-time merger transaction accounting adjustments. Total operating expense, including $8.9 million in stock-based compensation, was $25 million, down $14.7 million from a year earlier.

Adjusted EBITDA loss was $13.9 million, which Sehmi said was $1.5 million better than the first quarter of 2025 and $1.9 million higher than the fourth quarter of 2025.

NeoTensr, Nokia and Winmate Partnerships Highlighted

Munagala said Blaize expanded its NeoTensr contract, bringing total potential value to approximately $70 million. The company has signed a contract with NeoTensr expected to generate up to $50 million in revenue in the first year, building on more than $20 million in revenue recognized in the fourth quarter of 2025.

The deployment uses a co-branded AI server built on Blaize Quad cards, with each server handling more than 200 simultaneous camera streams with advanced AI analytics while also running large language model and vision-language model inference on the same infrastructure, Munagala said. He said the rollout is expected to span multiple cities across Asia-Pacific in multiple phases.

The company also entered into a strategic agreement with Winmate, which Munagala described as a publicly traded leader in ruggedized computing. The agreement is intended to close approximately $15 million in business in the first year. Blaize and Winmate plan to integrate Blaize AI into ruggedized systems, drones, handhelds, vehicle-mounted units and embedded devices for mission-critical operations, border security, maritime, essential infrastructure and field healthcare.

Blaize also emphasized its joint engagement with Nokia across Asia-Pacific. Munagala said the companies stood up a joint AI innovation lab focused on hybrid AI rack-scale development. The engagement includes a strategic partnership with Datacom, which Munagala described as one of Southeast Asia’s leading cloud service providers.

AI Services Seen as Recurring Revenue Opportunity

Munagala said Blaize announced Blaize AI Services at GITEX AI 2026 in April and plans to bring its first application service, face recognition, to market. He said the services are intended to turn AI infrastructure into production-ready APIs that cloud service providers, data center operators and system integrators can deploy, monetize and resell.

“AI services will complement our hardware sales with recurring application layer revenue per query,” Munagala said. “It’s higher margin, it’s stickier, and it scales with our partners’ growth, not just with their CapEx cycle.”

During the question-and-answer session, Munagala said initial face recognition use cases include smart kitchens, immigration, citizen safety and elderly care, with anchor customers in Asia. He said intelligent document processing is also under development and will be released to early-access cloud service providers once complete.

Sehmi said AI Services includes Blaize-powered hybrid servers, which produce upfront capital equipment revenue, as well as recurring revenue from API monetization recognized monthly as usage occurs. He said Blaize expects AI Services to begin contributing to the revenue mix in the fourth quarter and to become a more significant feature of the company’s 2027 revenue mix. In response to an analyst question, Sehmi said approximately 15% to 20% of the 2026 revenue outlook includes a combination of hardware and software tied to AI Services, largely expected in the fourth quarter.

Supply Chain Strategy and Financing

Management said Blaize’s hybrid server roadmap is intended to reduce exposure to HBM constraints. Sehmi said partner-branded servers powered by Blaize cards are expected to deliver competitive AI inference performance without requiring HBM, with shipments expected to begin in the second half of 2026. He said Blaize has placed forward orders for its chips and cards and is exploring ways to strategically procure certain memory cards to meet projected demand into 2027.

In the Q&A session, Sehmi said roughly 20% of the company’s $130 million 2026 revenue outlook may be tied to HBM-intensive systems, with the majority based on DDR or LPDDR memory configurations.

Blaize ended the first quarter with $33.3 million in cash as of March 31. On May 6, the company closed a $35 million equity offering supported by institutional investors. Sehmi said the raise extends the company’s runway to the middle of 2027 and will support commercial deal commitments, AI Services development, rack-scale hybrid platform advancement and next-generation platform development.

Munagala said the market is shifting from centralized GPU clusters for training toward sovereign AI infrastructure and inference at the edge. He said customers are seeking control over data, improved efficiency and application-level AI services they can resell.

“Hybrid AI delivers all three,” Munagala said.

About Blaize NASDAQ: BZAI

Blaize NASDAQ: BZAI is a fabless semiconductor company that designs and develops hardware and software solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications at the edge. The company’s core technology is centered on its proprietary Graph Streaming Processor (GSP) architecture, which combines dataflow computing with a highly parallel matrix processing engine to deliver real-time AI inference with low power consumption. Blaize’s platform is aimed at customers seeking to deploy sophisticated AI workloads in environments where power efficiency, latency and form factor are critical.

The company offers a hardware portfolio that includes standalone GSP modules, PCIe cards and M.2 form-factor boards, alongside its Blaize AI software stack.

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