Key points
- Super Micro estimates a record sales quarter
- Super Micro's margin beats forecast but trails June's
- Super Micro's new CFO came from Western Digital
Super Micro Computer (SMCI) said on Tuesday that sales for the quarter that ended Sept. 30 came in far above its own forecast, which the company credited to "increased demand for AI platforms." The stock was up 11.7% at $36.26 before the market opened Wednesday, as of 6:45 a.m. ET, after closing Tuesday at $32.47.
The estimate arrived six days after the company named a new chief financial officer.
Super Micro now expects revenue of $18.5 billion to $19.5 billion for the quarter. Its own forecast, given in August, was $14.5 billion to $15.5 billion. So even the bottom of the new range sits $3 billion above the top of the old one. Measured from the middle of each range, it's $19 billion against $15 billion, about 27% higher. Analysts had expected about $15 billion on average.
How big is that quarter for Super Micro?
If confirmed, the estimate would mark Super Micro's largest revenue quarter. The previous high was $12.68 billion, for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2025, according to the company's quarterly filings. Even the low end of Tuesday's range exceeds that by 46%, by our calculations.
A year earlier, the same July-to-September quarter brought in $5.02 billion. The new estimate is between 3.7 and 3.9 times that. The June quarter, the one just before, came in at $11.1 billion.
The company's fiscal year runs through June, and in its Aug. 11 results Super Micro forecast $65 billion to $72 billion in sales for the whole year. At $19 billion, the first quarter would be 26% to 29% of that. Tuesday's update covers only the quarter.
Margin beats forecast but trails June's
The second number is gross margin, the share of each sales dollar left after paying to build the servers. Super Micro estimated 12% to 12.5%, meaning it kept about 12 cents of every dollar. It had forecast 10.4% to 10.8%. The company said the difference came from "customer and product mix," which means which customers bought and which products they bought.
That's better than the forecast, but it's well below the June quarter, when the margin hit 17.5%. June was the odd one out. Super Micro had expected only 8.2% to 8.4% for that quarter, and then said in July that a "favorable customer and product mix" had pushed it to between 15% and 17%. For the full fiscal year that ended in June, the margin was 10.8%.
Super Micro has said customer mix can move its margin in either direction. Tuesday's release warns that as Super Micro goes after larger customers and larger deals, "our customer base may become more concentrated, our cost of sales may increase, our margins may be lower." In August, CEO Charles Liang said the company was "improving profitability through a richer enterprise customer mix." This quarter brought much bigger sales and a margin closer to the company's full-year levels.
A new finance chief started six days earlier
On Oct. 14, Super Micro's board named Mark Long chief financial officer, effective immediately. David Weigand stopped serving in the role that day. Long, 59, was CFO of Western Digital (WDC) from 2016 to 2019 and has been a principal at Prime Impact Capital, an investment and advisory firm, since 2019.
In the company's Oct. 15 announcement, Liang thanked Weigand "for his many years of service as CFO and for his support of an orderly transition." Weigand will help with the handover and then turn to work on improving and speeding up the business.
On Oct. 9, Shesha Krishnapura joined the board as an independent director. He was most recently chief technology officer of Intel IT at Intel (INTC). That was the same day director Judy Lin retired from the board. The company said Lin's decision "was not the result of any disagreement" with the company.
Long joins a company with some open questions on the finance side. Super Micro's latest annual report carried a third straight auditor finding that its internal controls were ineffective, and co-founder Wally Liaw was charged in March in a case over about $2.5 billion of servers allegedly diverted to China. Super Micro isn't a defendant in that case, and Liaw has pleaded not guilty.
How firm are these numbers?
The company calls these figures unaudited estimates based on management's numbers, and they're subject to change once it closes its books. Full results come on Nov. 3, with a call at 5 p.m. ET.
The last time Super Micro did this, in July, the early estimates held up. It said June-quarter sales would land near the low end of its $11.0 billion to $12.5 billion forecast, and they came in at $11.1 billion. The margin finished at 17.5%, a little above the 15% to 17% it had estimated.
In Seoul on Wednesday morning, SK Hynix and Samsung led a Kospi rebound after the estimate came out. Liang has talked publicly about the company's data center work for SpaceXAI.
