ReElement Technologies stock soars after securing $1.4B government deal
Rambus Inc. reported its Q3 2025 earnings, revealing a revenue beat but a significant earnings per share (EPS) miss. The company posted an EPS of $0.63, meeting the forecasted $0.63. Rambus shares rose 7.95% in aftermarket trading, reflecting investor optimism about the company’s revenue performance and future prospects. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains impressive gross profit margins of 81.61% and currently trades at a premium valuation, with 18 additional ProTips available for subscribers analyzing this $12.21 billion market cap company.
Key Takeaways
- Rambus reported Q3 revenue of $178.5 million, surpassing expectations.
- EPS met estimates, coming in at $0.63 against a forecast of $0.63.
- The stock surged 7.95% in aftermarket trading, closing at $108.96.
- Rambus maintains strong market leadership in DDR5 RCD and is expanding its product suite.
- The company projects significant revenue growth for Q4 2025.
Company Performance
Rambus showed robust revenue growth in Q3 2025, reporting $178.5 million, which exceeded expectations. The company continues to lead in the DDR5 RCD market and is expanding its product offerings, including PMICs and MRDIMMs. This growth is part of a broader trend driven by increasing demand for advanced memory solutions in AI and data centers.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $178.5 million, above forecast
- EPS: $0.63, in line with forecast of $0.63
- Product Revenue: $93.3 million, 41% YoY growth
- Cash from Operations: $88.4 million
- Cash and Equivalents: $673.3 million
Earnings vs. Forecast
Rambus’s Q3 2025 EPS of $0.63, in line with the forecasted $0.63.
Market Reaction
Rambus’s stock rose 7.95% in aftermarket trading, reaching $108.96. This increase reflects investor confidence in the company’s revenue growth and strategic positioning in key markets. The stock’s performance is notable given its proximity to the 52-week high of $114.55. InvestingPro data shows the stock has delivered an impressive 121.29% return over the past year, though current valuations suggest the stock may be trading above its Fair Value.
Outlook & Guidance
Rambus projects Q4 2025 revenue between $184 million and $190 million and anticipates full-year product revenue growth exceeding 40%. The company is focusing on the AI and data center markets, with expectations for its MRDIMM solutions to ramp up by late 2026/2027.
Executive Commentary
CEO Luc Seraphin expressed optimism about the company’s future, stating, "We do see all the favorable tailwinds for our business going into 2026." He emphasized Rambus’s role in AI advancements, saying, "Our groundbreaking memory connectivity and power management solutions are foundational to enabling the next generation of AI and HPC platforms."
Risks and Challenges
- Potential supply chain disruptions could impact production timelines.
- Market saturation in certain segments may limit growth potential.
- Macroeconomic pressures, such as inflation, could affect operational costs.
- DRAM pricing fluctuations could influence profit margins.
- Competition from other high-performance memory providers remains a challenge.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the anticipated market share for MRDIMM solutions and the impact of AI on server demand. Executives reassured stakeholders of Rambus’s strong market position and growth prospects, highlighting confidence in continued market share gains and minimal concerns about DRAM pricing impacts.
Full transcript - Rambus Inc (RMBS) Q3 2025:
Conference Operator: Welcome to the Rambus Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your touch-tone phone at any time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star zero at any time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer. You may proceed.
Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer, Rambus: Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Rambus Third Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. I am Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer at Rambus, and on the call with me today is Luc Seraphin, our CEO. The press release for the results that we will be discussing today has been filed with the SEC in Form 8-K. We are webcasting this call along with the slides that we will reference during portions of today’s call. A replay of this call can be accessed on our website beginning today at 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements, including our expectations regarding projected financial results, financial prospects, market growth, demand for our solutions, and other market factors, including reflections of the geopolitical and macroeconomic environment, and the effects of ASC 606 on reported revenue, amongst other items.
These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may be discussed during this call and are more fully described in the documents we file with the SEC, including our 8-Ks, 10-Qs, and 10-Ks. These forward-looking statements may differ materially from our actual results, and we are under no obligation to update these statements. In an effort to provide greater clarity in the financials, we are using both GAAP and non-GAAP financial presentations in both our press release and on this call. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financials to the most directly comparable GAAP measures has been included in our press release, in our slide presentation, and on our website at rambus.com on the Investor Relations page under Financial Releases. In addition, we will continue to provide operational metrics such as licensing billings to give our investors better insight into our operational performance.
The order of our call today will be as follows: Luc will start with an overview of the business, I will discuss our financial results, and then we will end with Q&A. I’ll now turn the call over to Luc to provide an overview of the quarter. Luc?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Thank you, Des. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Rambus delivered a very strong third quarter with solid sequential growth and revenue above expectations. Product revenue led the way with a double-digit increase and growth that outpaced the market. This was driven by sustained market leadership in DDR5 products, coupled with ramping contributions from our suite of new products. We also delivered another quarter of excellent cash from operations, highlighting the strength of our balanced business model while we continue to execute on our strategic roadmap. Leveraging our core expertise in signal and power integrity, our strategic focus on delivering complete solutions for high-performance memory subsystems positions us well amid strong secular trends in data center and AI markets. Turning to our businesses, I’m extremely pleased with the performance of our chip business.
In Q3, we delivered another product revenue record at $93 million and marked our sixth consecutive quarter of growth. As a cornerstone of our success, our DDR5 RCD leadership and ongoing market share gains continue to fuel our top-line growth. In addition, customer adoption of new products is progressing well, with initial production shipments now in motion. Looking forward, we expect our continued RCD market share leadership and increasing contributions from new products to drive full-year product revenue growth of over 40%. Our broad product offering, including chips for all JEDEC standard DDR5 and LPDDR5 modules, supports the full spectrum of high-performance computing platforms in servers and client systems. Our full chipset solutions offer customers not only the ease of one-stop shopping but also the greater assurance of interoperability, which becomes ever more critical as the complexity of design rises alongside data rates.
Through ongoing leadership in RCDs and growing traction across our portfolio of new products, we expect continued momentum and long-term growth. Turning to silicon IP, AI continues to drive design win momentum. The increasing pace and diversity of AI accelerator and networking IC designs is driving demand for high-speed memory, interconnect, and security IP. Led by our best-in-class HBM4, GDDR7, and PCIe7 solutions, our IP is critical to enabling the performance and security required by AI training and inference workloads. Focused on providing our customers with differentiated features and performance for the most challenging applications, we see momentum across our portfolio of cutting-edge solutions, and we remain on track for our long-term growth targets. As we look ahead, the rapidly rising adoption of AI is driving continued server growth. Training and inference require massive compute infrastructure to support increasingly complex and diverse workloads.
Notably, Agentic AI is emerging as a major catalyst for server demand, particularly for traditional CPU-based systems. This is helping to fuel the ongoing hyperscaler and enterprise refresh cycle, amplifying the growth in server unit shipments. In addition, the amount of memory per server continues to grow. AI workloads demand unprecedented levels of compute performance, driving increasing core counts and the need for more memory bandwidth and capacity. This translates to more DIMMs per server at higher data rates, as well as the need for novel high-performance memory solutions and enabling technologies. MRDIMM is a great example of this, as it leverages an innovative architecture to double the capacity and bandwidth versus standard RDIMMs. Scaling the amount of memory per server also creates demand for increasingly sophisticated power management solutions that optimize the efficiency and quality of power delivery.
We solve these complex problems for our customers with leading-edge products and are pleased to be on track to intercept compatible future generation systems with our complete industry standard MRDIMM and RDIMM chipsets. Going beyond servers, the release of each new client platform continues the trend of server-class technologies waterfalling into AI PCs as performance targets continue to rise. This drives demand for faster memory and more module chip content. Leveraging our fundamental signal and power integrity building blocks, our client chipsets are progressing well with growing customer traction, and we look forward to meeting this rising market need. The secular growth trend in data center, as well as the rising performance requirements across the computing landscape driven by AI, are highly favorable to Rambus and align directly with our long-term strategy.
Our groundbreaking memory connectivity and power management solutions are foundational to enabling the next generation of AI and HPC platforms by advancing system memory bandwidth and capacity capabilities. Having identified the increasing technical demands of data-intensive applications as opportunities, we have developed a roadmap that builds on our leadership in signal and power integrity to enable robust high-performance memory subsystems. In closing, Q3 was a very strong quarter with solid financial results. Our continued product leadership in DDR5 and increasing momentum in new products are underpinned by the company’s strong alignment with positive secular trends in data center and AI. This gives us great confidence in our ongoing success and our ability to deliver long-term profitable growth. I want to thank our customers, partners, and employees for their continued support. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Des to walk us through the financials. Des?
Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer, Rambus: Thank you, Luc. I’d like to begin with a summary of our financial results for the third quarter on slide three. We are pleased with our strong Q3 financial results as we continue to execute on our strategic initiatives. As Luc mentioned earlier, we continued our market leadership position in DDR5 products and have started to see increasing contributions from our suite of new products. Our diversified portfolio continues to deliver strong results, which led to outstanding cash generation in the quarter of $88 million, which further strengthened our balance sheet. Our consistent ability to generate cash allows us to strategically invest in our product roadmap to drive our long-term growth. Let me now provide you a summary of our non-GAAP income statement on slide five. Revenue for the third quarter was $178.5 million, which was above our expectations. Royalty revenue was $65.1 million, while licensing billings were $66.1 million.
The difference between licensing billings and royalty revenue mainly relates to timing, as we do not always recognize revenue in the same quarter as we bill our customers. Product revenue was $93.3 million, as we delivered another quarter of record product revenue. This represents a 15% sequential increase and a 41% year-over-year growth driven by continued strength in DDR5 products and ramping new product contributions. Contract and other revenue was $20.1 million, consisting predominantly of silicon IP. As a reminder, only a portion of our silicon IP revenue is reflected in contract and other revenue, and the remaining portion is reported in royalty revenue as well as in licensing billings. Total operating costs, including cost of goods sold for the quarter, were $99.3 million. Operating expenses were $64.6 million, as we continue to invest in our growth opportunities in a disciplined manner.
Interest and other income for the third quarter was $6 million. Using an assumed flat tax rate of 20% for non-GAAP pre-tax income, non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $68.2 million. Now, let me turn to the balance sheet details on slide six. We ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaling $673.3 million, up from Q2, primarily driven by strong cash from operations of $88.4 million. Third quarter capital expenditures were $8.4 million, with depreciation expense of $8 million. We delivered $80 million of free cash flow in the quarter. Let me now review our non-GAAP outlook for the fourth quarter on slide seven. As a reminder, the forward-looking guidance reflects our current best estimates at this time, and our actual results could differ materially from what I’m about to review.
The economic environment remains a dynamic environment, and we continue to actively monitor this situation. In addition to the non-GAAP financial outlook under ASC 606, we also provide information on licensing billings, which is an operational metric that reflects amounts invoiced to our licensing customers during the period adjusted for certain differences. We expect revenue in the fourth quarter to be between $184 million and $190 million. We expect royalty revenue to be between $59 million and $65 million, and licensing billings between $60 million and $66 million. We expect Q4 non-GAAP total operating costs, which includes COGS, to be between $99 million and $103 million. We expect Q4 capital expenditures to be approximately $10 million. Non-GAAP operating results for the fourth quarter are expected to be between a profit of $81 million and $91 million.
For non-GAAP interest and other income and expense, we expect $6 million of interest income. We expect the pro forma tax rate to be 20%, with non-GAAP tax expenses to be between $17.4 million and $19.4 million in Q4. We expect Q4 share count to be 109.5 million diluted shares outstanding. Overall, we anticipate the Q4 non-GAAP earnings per share range between $0.64 and $0.71. Let me finish with a summary on slide eight. In closing, our team delivered strong third-quarter financial results, setting another record for product revenue and continued strong cash generation. Our robust balance sheet continues to allow us to invest in market expansion opportunities. Our product portfolio, including silicon IP and chip solutions, is strategically aligned to capitalize on the growing opportunities in data center and AI.
Before I open up the call to Q&A, I would like to thank our employees for their continued teamwork and execution. With that, I’ll turn the call back to our operator to begin Q&A. Could we have our first question?
Conference Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a quick reminder, if you have a question, please press star one on your touch-tone phone. The first question comes from Tristan Gerra with Baird. You may proceed.
Hi, good afternoon. You recently quantified the MRDIMM TAM opportunity. Is it fair to assume you can replicate the market share with MRDIMM that you have currently in DDR5? Also, when do you think you can fully realize the TAM that you quantified for MRDIMM? Is that something that we could envision for 2028?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Hi, Tristan. Thank you for your question. Yeah, we’re very pleased with the progress we’re making with the MRDIMM development. We do believe that, you know, with time in the long run, we can reach, you know, similar market share as we have with the DDR, market share we currently have on DDR5. The timing of that really depends on the rollout of platforms from, you know, our main partners on the CPU side, you know, Intel and AMD. To the extent that they roll out their platform, I think it’s fair to say that, you know, we’re going to ramp in large volumes towards the very end of 2026 and probably 2027. 2028 is probably a good time to look at, you know, this type of market share. The other thing I would add regarding MRDIMM is that it’s a much more complex system.
Because of the system requirements, we will need a tight coupling of the chips on that MRDIMM. There’s an opportunity for us to have more content as the interoperability of all those chips on that MRDIMM is going to become very critical.
Great. As a quick follow-up, regarding the recently announced Ethernet scale-up networking architecture at OCP, does that provide opportunities for Rambus on the licensing side?
Thank you, Tristan. Our silicon IP portfolio is very focused on high-speed memory, high-speed interconnect, and security. Certainly, with our networking customers and our memory customers, we are on the leading edge of technology, whether it is on GDDR and HBM on the memory side or PCIe7 on the networking side. What we’ve seen recently is an acceleration of demand for the latest technology. The transition from PCIe5 to PCIe7 is moving very, very fast, and that’s certainly an opportunity for us.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. You may proceed.
Yeah, thanks for taking the questions. I’ve got a couple as well. I guess first, kind of sticking on the technology, you know, evolution of what we’re seeing in some of these processors is there’s a lot of news recently around the move towards SOCAMs, and SOCAM2 in particular is getting JEDEC standardization. Can you help us maybe think about Rambus’s opportunity set in SOCAM2 modules and when maybe you would expect to see that in any kind of framing of kind of the dollar content opportunity on those modules?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Thank you, Aaron. The first thing I would say is that we are excited to see the emergence of these new architectures that actually play on our strengths and focus in signal integrity and power integrity. As you know, the first attempt at SOCAM didn’t work that well. As a reminder, the attempt was actually to take benefit of the low power and high bandwidth of LPDDR, but to put this on modules. When you put this on modules, you actually break the signal integrity and the reliability of the system. We are pleased to see those efforts going into JEDEC because I think the industry is eventually going to resolve those issues. As a reminder, as we said in our remarks, we currently have solutions for all JEDEC module systems, both for LPDDR and DDR, and both for client and server.
The fact that it’s going through JEDEC is actually good news for us. There will be opportunity for us, certainly opportunity for the SPD Hub chip. There’s going to be some development on voltage regulators, but as we said, power management is also something we’re focusing on. We see this as an opportunity. We don’t expect the volumes to be very high. These things actually go into system and chip solutions, very tight systems where the volumes are not necessarily very, very high. It’s early to say what the content is going to be, but that’s certainly an area we’re going to play in given that the company focuses on both the signal integrity and power integrity. The fact that it’s moving to JEDEC is good news for us.
Yep, very good. Maybe as a follow-up to that, the answer is on the PMICs side, you know, your product chipset business did really well this quarter, growing over 40%. It looks like that appears to be sustainable, you know, as we look forward. How do we think about the opportunity of PMICs? How much does that represent of your product chipset business today? Maybe unpack how quickly you’re seeing that ramp, you know, looking forward.
Thank you, Aaron. The way we look at these products is, you know, we have a whole suite of new products, including the PMICs. And the PMICs is actually a suite of products. If you remember the product announcements we’ve made over the last few years, we had the first generation of PMICs family announced in Q2 of last year, the clock driver announced in Q3. Then we had the second generation of PMICs announced in Q4, as well as Gen 2 LCDs and MRDIMMs. This year, in Q2, we announced the family of PMICs for the client space. What you see is we do have a whole suite of products that are companion chips. We’re pleased with the progress this year. In Q2, these chips represented low single-digit contribution to our product revenue.
As we indicated, Q3 was on track with mid single-digit, and in Q4, it’s going to be mid to high single digits. In aggregate, we are pleased with the momentum. It’s not going to be a step function. We have different stages of qualification and pre-production on different modules, on different platforms, current platforms, and future platforms. We have products that are in early qualification, we have products that are in pre-production, and we have products that are in full production now. There’s a strong momentum. As these products percolate through the ecosystem, we do believe that we’re going to continue to see growth. Now, specifically to PMICs, what we have observed is that we have lots of success with a very high-end PMIC. There’s a lot of excitement there.
They are the most complex PMICs to make, but they’re also the ones that are showing the best performance compared to our competition. That’s exciting for us. These very high-end PMICs are going to be linked to next-generation platforms with AMD and Intel, but we certainly have the early generation of PMICs also running out in the market. It’s difficult to separate PMICs from the rest. As I said, we have many products at many stages of development with our customers, but what we see is very strong momentum to grow that revenue quarter by quarter, given the progress we’re making.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The following comes from Gary Mobley with Loop Capital. You may proceed.
Good evening, guys. Let me extend my congratulations to the solid results. I want to start asking about any sort of supply chain considerations first on your side. Do you see any extension of the order lead times that your customers are seeing as they place an order with you, given any sort of constraints that TSMC may have? Away from you, are you seeing any sort of impact on the market relating to any sort of constraints on high-capacity server DIMMs or the DRAM to support that market, considering most of the memory IDMs are prioritizing HBM at this point?
Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer, Rambus: Thanks for your question. Like others within the industry, we are carefully monitoring the supply situation. With regards to Rambus Inc., I was pleased that we were able to grow our inventory in the third quarter. We grew inventory by about $6 million, which will support our growth in Q4. In addition, I would highlight that we’ve not seen any notable buildup of customer inventory in the third quarter. Really looking at our own supply chain and manufacturing, in terms of front-end manufacturing, it is important to note that we are not on leading-edge technology nodes. On the back end, we continue to have strong long-term relationships with our manufacturing partners. We do see some pockets of tightness, and we continue to work with our partners to improve the lead times there.
Looking at Q4, I would expect to see a slight increase in our own internal inventory to support customers’ Q1 2026 demand. I would say overall, we have a robust supply chain, which has enabled our strong product revenue growth, and we’ll continue to work with our manufacturing partners to support our growth objectives going forward.
Got it. That’s helpful. In the RCD market specifically, I would assume that you’re running about, you know, or above 40% market share. Do you see a natural cap there, given that this is more or less a three, you know, sort of a three-supplier market, maybe two additional suppliers in sort of the nascent stages of their development? Do you see that as a natural cap, or do we see maybe 45%, 50% market share on the horizon?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Thanks, Gary. What we said last year in 2024 is that on the DDR5 generation, we were in the early 40% market share. We actually disclose market shares once a year because of some situations we have every quarter. If you look at the current outlook for this year, it looks like we’re going to continue to grow share. The market for servers or DIMMs has increased mid to high single digit, and as Des indicated in his prepared remarks, we grew 40% year over year. We have certainly gained share this year on this market, and we still believe we can continue to gain share. We always have the objective of 40 to 50%, so there’s room to gain share. We’re also early in the DDR5 cycles. It’s been three years in, and we expect the DDR5 cycle to last about seven years.
We do expect to continue to have the possibility of winning shares. The other thing is I think that when the products become more complex and the interoperability becomes more complex as well, because we have a complete chipset, that’s going to help us continue to gain share. Certainly, there’s going to be a cap, but we don’t see the cap in the near future at this point in time.
Thank you both.
Thanks, Gary.
Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer, Rambus: Thanks, Daddy.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Mehdi Hosseini with Susquehanna. You may proceed.
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Yes, thanks for taking my question. This is for the team. I think it would be very helpful if you could remind us how to think about different TAM and give us an update. In the past, we have talked about the buffer chip companion, CXL, and HBM IP. Perhaps with the diversification in the DRAM, with the inclusion of MRDIMM, there are some changes there. In that context, it would be great if you could give us what the TAM will look like, let’s say, two or three years from now. I have a follow-up. Yeah. Thank you, Mehdi. We’d like to separate the, I would say, the product from, you know, from the silicon IP. On the product side, we estimate the TAM for the RCD market to be around $800 million.
Then you add to this $600 million of companion chips, half of it being power management chips and the other half being the other companion chips. You can think about the market growing mid to high single digits in aggregate. There are additional, I would say, tailwinds to this with the increase of number of channels and the increase of number of DIMMs per channel. This will translate not into a step function, but some tailwinds to that TAM. In addition to that, we see a TAM of about $600 million for the MRDIMM itself, which adds to this. The MRDIMM, as we discussed earlier, is not going to hit the market before very late in 2026, 2027, depending on the rollout of the platforms from AMD and Intel primarily.
Now, if you turn to the silicon IP business, it’s hard to have a TAM number for the silicon IP business. What I would say is that as part of our portfolio, we are at the center of what matters for AI. Our portfolio is focused on PCIe7 and the future generations, on HBM4 and future generations, and on GDDR and future generations. There’s a pull for design staff on all of these IP. Given the type of business model on the licensing side, it’s hard to estimate a TAM for this. What I would say is that we are on track to meet our growth targets of that business of double-digit growth. Okay, great. Just a quick follow-up here. Should I assume that MRDIMM margin is comparable to product, or would it be more like an IP type of margin?
Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer, Rambus: Hi, Madee. It’s Dave here. In terms of the MRDIMM, this is obviously a chip product that we will be selling here. What I would say is I would keep it within the same sort of margins of our product business. The long-term goal of that business is 60 to 65%. I would keep the MRDIMM margins within that. We continue to produce strong margin results on the chip side. We’re really pleased with the portfolio that we have.
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Sure. Great. My second question has to do with just looking beyond the December and seasonality. I’m under the impression that when it comes to servers and companionship, maybe there could be better than seasonal trends into early part of 2026. I want to see how you’re looking at those trends. I’m not asking for a guide. I’m not asking for a specific revenue guide, just trends. Would better than seasonal trends that I see in the server and AI also apply to Rambus? We do see, thank you, Mehdi, we do see the market for servers continue to grow between mid to high single digit going into next year. There are some tailwinds, as we said, because of the growth of inference, for example, or Agentic AI. That’s going to create tailwinds for standard CPU types of solutions.
We do see a growth between mid and high single digit for the server market next year. Typically, in Q4, we have our customers being prudent with the inventory before the year-end. That happens every year. That’s included in our guide for Q4 that we just gave. Things are going to be back on track in Q1 of 2026. We keep saying that one of the reasons we don’t guide beyond one quarter is that things are changing very, very fast and visibility is not the best. We do see all the favorable tailwinds for our business going into 2026. Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Kevin Cassidy with Rosenblatt Securities. You may proceed.
Yes, thanks for taking my question and congratulations on the great results. Just looking at the market, the DRAM market, and you know, maybe Gary touched on it with the lead times stretching out and prices going up. Is there any concern at all of servers, you know, despecing as the price of DRAMs go higher, or is the need for DRAM and AI applications so strong that there won’t be a despecing?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: That’s a good question for the memory vendors. I would say that historically, we’ve been kind of agnostic to DRAM pricing. I think what the industry is going to have to go through is to deal with the growth of demand for data centers in general and to have some arbitrage between the different types of memory. I don’t think that the DRAM pricing is going to have any impact on the demand for our products.
Desmond Lynch, Chief Financial Officer, Rambus: Thanks, Luc. Just to add in, Kevin, can you hear me?
Yes.
Kevin, I would just add in the fact that, you know, the inventory levels within the channel continue to remain sort of lean. When I look at inventory in Q3 versus Q2, and this is of our chips that our customers are holding, we saw no notable inventory build. I would really put that down to two factors. One, it’s been the multiple generations of DDR5 being in the market and really the legacy overhang of over-ordering of DDR4 inventory from a couple of years ago. I would say the inventory position just now is lean in terms of our sort of chips.
Right. Okay, great. Maybe just along that, you mentioned you’re two years into this DDR5 cycle, and maybe it’s three generations of DDR5 modules. What’s the bell curve like of your shipments? What is that doing to ASPs as you go forward?
Hey, Kevin. It’s Dave. We’ve been really delighted with how we’ve been able to execute on the DDR5 cycle. We’re in the middle of a fast-paced DDR5 transition with multiple generations in the market today. I would say that in Q3, the predominance of our shipments was the second generation of DDR5, with growing and early production volumes of the third generation coming into the market. As I look ahead into Q4, I would still expect the predominance to be the second generation, with really growing contributions of the third generation coming into the market. In terms of pricing, what we’ve talked about in the past is when we move from one generation to the next generation, we do see a bump up in pricing, which is obviously beneficial for us from there. We’ll continue to see that benefit going into the numbers.
We saw the benefit in the gross margin outlook in the third quarter on the product chip side, which increased about 300 basis points, which was really a combination of the product mix as well as continued manufacturing savings coming into the model. Overall, we’re really pleased with how we’re executing on the DDR5 generation. Irrespective of what generation is ramping into the market, through our early investment and continued leadership, we have confidence in our overall market share and leadership position.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thanks, Kevin.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The following comes from Jae Kim with Arati Research. You may proceed.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I want to ask about the outlook for CXL. There are a lot of perspectives on how this market develops, especially with the CXL 3.1 expected next year, and your competitor like Montage becoming increasingly aggressive on the controller side. At the same time, greater adoption of MRDIMMs in the future could address current memory capacity constraints. Can you share your view on how you see the CXL market evolving and what the Rambus strategy is in terms of controllers or other engagement in this space? Thank you.
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Thank you, Nam. We have two plays or two possible plays in CXL. One is on the silicon IP business. We do have CXL controllers of different generations, and this has been part of this focus portfolio I was talking about, where we do have traction. A lot of people developing chips need a CXL interface, and they have the possibility of buying that interface from us. This has been one of the driver vectors of our growth in the silicon IP business. What we have observed is that every one of our customers tends to develop a bespoke solution for one, sometimes only one or two customers. The chips that use the CXL market are very fragmented. That’s how we look at it.
Although we did have and we do have a CXL product development, we believe at this point in time that it does not make economic sense to actually roll out that product in the market because what we noticed is that we would have to develop a specific chip for a specific customer who themselves would have a specific customer as well. We’d rather play on the FIP side for CXL. What I would say is that CXL is very exciting in terms of being an interface that is accepted by everyone. For us, it’s not that exciting in terms of products. We do believe that the usage model that is the most promising is actually memory expansion. To your question, a very good question, the MRDIMM answers that because it uses the current infrastructure of standard servers.
Just by using this MRDIMM type of architectures, we can double the capacity and the bandwidth using that same infrastructure. That’s the option we’ve taken at this point in time. As the market develops, as we’ve done in the past, we can pivot, but at this point in time, this is where we are.
Thank you. It’s clear. Thank you.
Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The following comes from Kevin Garrigan with Jefferies. You may proceed.
Hi, all. Let me echo my congrats on the results. On the MRDIMM opportunity, you talked about customers starting qualifications. Is there anything more that you need to do or can do to kind of help yourselves capture share there, or is it pretty much all in the customer’s hands at this point?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: It’s in the customer’s hands, our hands, and the hands of the people who deploy the platforms like Intel and AMD because they have to be ready with their platforms as well. I would say on our hand, what plays in our hand is really the fact that we have a complete chipset for MRDIMM. That’s critically important because when you double the capacity and you double the bandwidth, that interoperability is critical to the MRDIMM actually working. I think that customers are going to be looking at their suppliers like us to really help them not only on the development of the chips, but also on the testing of the whole platform, given how compact it’s going to be and how fast it’s going to have to run at. This is what I think is going to play in our hands.
The fact that we have invested for a long time in signal integrity and power integrity allows us to have a complete chipset, and having a complete chipset is going to help us with interoperability testing with our customers.
Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Just as a quick follow-up, going off of a previous question in your silicon IP business, you know, you guys are doing well in HBM, but can you just talk about how traction has been with PCIe7 and secured IP in that business?
I’ll start, let’s just jump in. Typically, we don’t split these things, but at a high level, security is about 50% of our business. Between your controllers, memory controllers, or PCIe controllers, that’s the other 50%. I would say security is widespread in terms of its application. It’s really going into lots of applications with lots of customers in very different markets. PCIe and HBM, we tend to work with a large number of customers, but much smaller. We tend to work on the bleeding-edge solutions for these. We mentioned HBM4 and PCIe7. We typically work with large customers who need to develop the latest and fastest solution, mostly for the data center and the AI market. It’s a different dynamic there. Typically, we have a higher ASP, longer time development with the bleeding-edge solution for memory and PCIe. It’s a much broader and faster cycle on the security side.
That’s the way to look at it.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you, and congrats on the results.
Thank you, Kevin.
Conference Operator: Thank you. The final question is a follow-up from Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. You may proceed.
Yeah. Thanks for doing the follow-up question. Just kind of thinking back again to the architecture evolution and this AI demand that you’re seeing, when you guys look at your RCD business today, how do you assess kind of the number of channels today that you’re shipping into on a per socket or per CPU basis, and how that’s evolved and whether or not, you know, moving from 8 to 12, and do you see 12 going to 16 channels as we look out, you know, into 2026?
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Thank you, Aaron. Certainly, you know, AI workloads need more memory than, you know, standard types of applications and more bandwidth. The very fact that the industry is converging to 12 channels is good. Remember, it’s only lately that, you know, Intel moved to 12 channels. It’s going to have, you know, a, I would say, modest impact, but positive impact. We do see these memory, these CPU vendors, you know, announcing the 16-channel solution, and that’s going to be necessary. There’s still, of course, no plans of going beyond, you know, beyond maybe to 20. The issue is, you know, you cannot just add channels after channels. It creates constraints on the packaging designs and the chip designs. I see there’s going to be a limitation there, but that’s certainly a tailwind for us.
That’s going to, you know, help us, as we said earlier, continue to grow, you know, our product business.
On that channel discussion, how does that work with MRDIMMs?
MRDIMMs is going to intercept the next generation of platforms from AMD and Intel. These next-generation platforms from AMD and Intel, they announced 16 channel. MRDIMM is a very dense solution, so the number of DIMMs per channel is going to be the question. These new platforms for Gen 5 are going to be around 16 channels per CPU. That’s the generation that intercepts MRDIMM.
Right. Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you. I will now pass it back over to Loop Capital for closing remarks.
Luc Seraphin, CEO, Rambus: Thank you to everyone who has joined us today for your continued interest and time. We look forward to speaking with you again soon. Have a very good day. Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank you. This now concludes today’s conference.
This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.