Sanmina Q3 earnings call highlights. July 27, 2026 Key points. * Strong third-quarter results: Sanmina reported revenue of $3.46 billion, up 69.7% year over year, while non-GAAP operating margin increased to 8.0% and diluted EPS more than doubled to $3.31. Core revenue rose 17% to $2.4 billion, supplemented by $1.1 billion from ZT Systems. * AI infrastructure remains the primary growth driver: Communications networks, cloud and AI infrastructure accounted for 62% of revenue, with the company investing in power, liquid cooling, testing and automation capacity. Next-generation accelerated-compute revenue is expected to begin contributing in fiscal Q1 2027. * Management maintained an optimistic outlook: Sanmina expects fiscal 2026 revenue of $14 billion to $14.3 billion and reiterated confidence in exceeding $16 billion of revenue in fiscal 2027, supported by accelerating AI data-center demand. * MarketBeat previews the top five stocks to own by August 1st. Sanmina NASDAQ: SANM reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $3.46 billion, up 69.7% from a year earlier, as growth in its core business and the contribution from ZT Systems lifted results. The company said revenue reached the high end of its outlook range, while non-GAAP operating margin and earnings per share exceeded its prior expectations. Non-GAAP operating margin was 8.0%, up 230 basis points year over year, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share rose 116% to $3.31. Cash flow from operations totaled $124.5 million during the quarter ended June 27. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jure Sola said the company was executing to plan across both its core operations and the ZT Systems business. "We are expanding existing partnerships," Sola said. "We're adding new customers and new projects to drive future growth." Core business and ZT Systems results. Core Sanmina revenue totaled $2.4 billion, an increase of 17% from the prior-year period, with growth across all end markets and continued strength in cloud and AI infrastructure. ZT Systems contributed $1.1 billion in revenue, landing at the midpoint of the company's outlook. Executive Vice President and CFO Jon Faust said the company's revenue performance reflected broad-based demand, while profitability benefited from business mix, cost management and non-recurring engineering services related to product launches. "Our revenue of $3.46 billion came in at the high end of our outlook range," Faust said. "This was driven by both the core Sanmina business, which exceeded its outlook range, with growth coming from all end markets, and the ZT Systems business, which came in at the midpoint of its outlook range." * Integrated Manufacturing Solutions revenue was $2.96 billion, up 79.4% year over year. Its non-GAAP gross margin was 10.2%, up 270 basis points. * Components, Products and Services revenue was $546 million, up 29.2% year over year. Its non-GAAP gross margin was 12.8%, down 190 basis points from a year earlier but up 120 basis points sequentially. The CPS revenue increase was driven by metal fabrication for AI system racks and high-technology printed circuit boards used in aerospace and defense products. The year-over-year margin decline in the segment reflected depreciation and other expenses associated with investments in new programs, according to Faust. AI infrastructure investments and ZT integration. Sanmina said it continued to integrate ZT Systems and invest in incremental power, liquid cooling, test-cell capacity and automation needed for the next generation of accelerated-compute products. The company said it secured additional customer orders during the third quarter, expanding its customer base beyond orders announced previously. Discover more Financial News EV Market Analysis Faust said customer validation efforts were progressing in collaboration with AMD and joint customers, with Sanmina supporting nearly all pre-production activities. He said the company expects next-generation accelerated-compute revenue to begin contributing in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and ramp over time, rather than affecting fourth-quarter revenue. The company also said its expanded cloud and AI infrastructure focus has led to incremental programs in the core Sanmina business, including new customers and additional platforms. Faust confirmed during the question-and-answer session that Cerebras was among the additional platform businesses referenced by the company. Sola said AI demand remains strong, while the company is also seeing favorable conditions in industrial and energy, medical, defense and aerospace markets. Communications networks, cloud and AI infrastructure represented 62% of third-quarter revenue, or $2.148 billion, up 173.2% year over year. The company's other end markets represented 38% of revenue, or $1.316 billion, up 4.8%. Core Sanmina recorded a book-to-bill ratio above 1.1 during the quarter, Sola said. Balance sheet, capital spending and outlook. Sanmina ended the quarter with $1.84 billion in cash and cash equivalents and no borrowings outstanding on its $1.5 billion revolving credit facility. The company said total liquidity, including a delayed-draw term loan facility, was about $4 billion. Its net leverage ratio was 0.29 times, below its long-term target range of 1.0 to 2.0 times. Inventory, net of customer advances, was $2.2 billion, up 87.2% from a year earlier, primarily due to the ZT Systems acquisition. Faust said working capital is expected to rise further as the company invests ahead of anticipated growth in both core Sanmina and ZT Systems. Capital expenditures were $100.9 million in the third quarter. The company said its investments include metal fabrication capacity for AI racks, printed-circuit-board capabilities, medium-voltage transformers, and ZT Systems capacity for power, liquid cooling, testing and automation. For the fiscal fourth quarter, Sanmina forecast: * Revenue of $3.3 billion to $3.6 billion, including $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion from core Sanmina and $800 million to $1 billion from ZT Systems. * Non-GAAP operating margin of 7.5% to 8.0%. * Non-GAAP diluted EPS of $3.05 to $3.35. * Capital expenditures of about $135 million. The ZT Systems fourth-quarter outlook is below the company's prior implied guidance because of timing on a few legacy programs, Faust said. He added that the change was unrelated to the next-generation accelerated-compute program, which remains on track but is not included in the fourth-quarter outlook because of revenue-recognition timing. For fiscal 2026, Sanmina expects revenue of $14 billion to $14.3 billion, non-GAAP operating margin of 6.85% to 7.25%, and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $11.90 to $12.20. The company expects core Sanmina revenue of $9.1 billion to $9.2 billion, representing 12.6% growth at the midpoint. Management reiterated confidence that Sanmina can generate more than $16 billion in revenue in fiscal 2027, with higher growth expected in the second half of that year as AI data-center demand and accelerated-compute programs ramp. About Sanmina (NASDAQ:SANM). Sanmina Corporation is a leading global electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider specializing in the design, production and end-to-end supply chain solutions for complex electronic products. Founded in 1980, the company has built a reputation for delivering high-reliability manufacturing across a wide range of industries, including communications, computing, aerospace and defense, medical, automotive and industrial sectors. Sanmina's core offerings encompass product design and engineering support, precision PCB fabrication and assembly, system integration, testing, and final system deployment. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. Before you consider Sanmina, you'll want to hear this. MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and Sanmina wasn't on the list. While Sanmina currently has a Hold rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys. The space race is growing fast, and you don't have to have gotten in early on SpaceX to profit. This report shows seven space stocks you can buy today that may grow as rockets, satellites, defense, space internet, and new space technology become more important.

AMD Helios scrutinized: the rack is the new server. With Helios, AMD is delivering its first-ever fully proprietary rack-scale AI system: 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs, Epyc Venice processors, Pensando networking technology, and the ROCm stack in one integrated whole. The ambition is far from modest: to build the most powerful AI rack in the world, based on open standards. "Our North Star with Helios was to build a system that utilizes the full capacity of our compute, in an open rack architecture with open standards, and that raises the bar in terms of efficiency, maintainability, and reliability. That was the team's mission." This is how Andrew Dieckmann, corporate VP and GM Data Center GPU, summarizes the task AMD set for itself over a year ago. At Advancing AI 2026, the time has come: Helios is officially launched and is in production today. Why a rack? Traditional AI racks are essentially stacks of individual GPU servers talking to each other over a scale-out network, resulting in multiple network hops, latency, and congestion. Helios breaks with that model: the entire rack behaves as a single system. "The rack becomes the new system boundary," says Mark Chubb, corporate VP Platform Architecture, who joined from rack builder ZT Systems. All 72 GPUs share 31 TB of HBM4 memory accessible via a single switch hop, with 260 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth. Every GPU talks to every other GPU at identical speeds, regardless of where it is in the rack, so software doesn't have to worry about topology. The overall figures are staggering: 2.9 exaflops of FP4 compute and 1.4 exaflops of FP8 per rack, 1.7 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth, and 43 TB/s of scale-out bandwidth to the rest of the data center. Eighteen compute trays, six switch trays. Physically, Helios is a double-wide ORW rack (Open Rack Wide, developed with Meta) measuring 1.2 by 1.3 meters and 44OU high. It houses eighteen compute trays and six switch trays, connected at the rear via four interchangeable cassettes with all-copper cabling. Each compute tray of just 10U contains four liquid-cooled Instinct MI455X GPUs and one Epyc Venice SP7 processor that participates directly in the memory domain via coherent Infinity Fabric connections at 256 GB/s per GPU. Such a tray weighs approximately 77 kilograms and has 576 differential connections: 120 kilograms of force is required to slide it in. The switch tray goes even further: 1,728 connections and 310 kilograms of pushing force, hence the strikingly long handles that serve as levers. Inside are two Broadcom Tomahawk 6 switch ASICs each. Twelve switch ASICs thus connect all GPUs in a single-hop, multi-plane fabric based on UALink over Ethernet (UALoE). Notably, everything remains serviceable in-rack. Trays slide out completely for replacing DIMMs or cards, without the need for a server lift or crash cart. Pensando ties it all together. The network is not an afterthought but a crucial part of Helios, and that's where AMD's Pensando division comes in. "AI scales at the speed of data transport," says Krishna Doddapaneni, corporate VP Pensando. Three networks work together. At the front, the Pensando Salina 400 DPU handles the front-end network: a programmable card that offloads network virtualization, firewalling, encryption, and NVMe storage services from the CPU, including a key-value interface for the increasingly important KV cache traffic of AI models. The scale-up network connects the 72 GPUs via UALoE into that single logical memory domain. And for scale-out to thousands of GPUs, each GPU provides space for three Pensando Vulcano 800G AI NICs, together accounting for 2.4 terabits per second per GPU. In addition to standard RoCE, the programmable Vulcano also supports new transport protocols such as MRC, which AMD developed together with OpenAI. Designed to fail. In a system of this scale, failures are not a risk but a certainty, so Helios is designed around failure. If a switch crashes or a switch tray needs to be replaced? No disaster: traffic is automatically rerouted and the training job continues with temporarily slightly less bandwidth, instead of failing. Management is also redundant: the AMD Fabric Manager runs in triplicate on the computing power of the switch trays themselves, so that even the failure of a management instance does not affect the fabric. Furthermore, an operator can use virtual pods to divide the rack into isolated sub-clusters per tenant: if one pod crashes, the others won't notice. The network control runs on the open-source SONiC, and everything AMD adds is upstreamed. Customers are lining up. The strongest indicator is the customers. OpenAI signed a multi-year, six-gigawatt deal last fall, Meta followed in February with an equally large agreement regarding custom GPUs, and Microsoft announced a large-scale Helios rollout on Azure earlier this week. At the event itself, a multi-gigawatt agreement with Anthropic is added to that, including a long-term technical collaboration. Together with Oracle and a series of neoclouds, AMD expects to roll out several gigawatts of Helios infrastructure over the coming year. And CUDA, the eternal stumbling block? Dieckmann brushes it aside: "I used to talk to customers about CUDA regularly. Today, I have almost no conversations about it anymore. It's a non-event. Everyone is programming at higher levels of abstraction, and AI agents help customers optimize for our platform. Software obstacles are much easier to overcome than they were a few years ago." When asked about the supply chain - no small detail for a system with so many components - Dieckmann replies that AMD is taking charge itself: "We don't sell Helios as an AMD system, but we work with the entire ecosystem to ensure that all parts are available in the right quantities, at the right time, and with the right quality. We've been working on that for many, many months." Against Vera Rubin. AMD is positioning Helios head-to-head against Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin NVL72, claiming 15 percent more FP4 compute, 50 percent more HBM memory, 50 percent more scale-out bandwidth, and up to 30 percent more tokens per euro. Some nuance is appropriate here. Vera Rubin was announced at CES and, like Helios, will appear in the second half of the year: AMD is therefore comparing its measurements and models with the published specifications of a rack that is also not yet running at customer sites, while Nvidia, for its part, promises five times the inference performance of Blackwell and ten times lower token costs. And despite Dieckmann's "non-event": the bulk of AI tooling and developers still live in the CUDA ecosystem, and Nvidia is sliding its new rack into a customer base that is already running on Blackwell en masse today. The burden of proof lies with the challenger. The trend is nonetheless clear: for the first time, AMD is putting forward a complete rack that, on paper, is no less capable, with the Instinct MI455X as the engine, Epyc Venice as the conductor, and an open ecosystem as a selling point. The gigawatt signatures from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Microsoft show that the largest buyers believe in that story, if only to no longer be dependent on a single supplier. In the second half of the year, Helios must prove in real data centers that paper specifications also translate into running tokens. Only then will ITdaily know if AMD's rack is a full-fledged alternative, or primarily an excellent bargaining chip toward Nvidia.