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Back of Napkin

Super Micro Computer, Inc. SMCI

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Super Micro's revenue more than doubled to $12.68B in a single quarter and its gross margin fell from 11.8% to 6.3% in the same three months.

Inventory now stands at $11.10B, up 137%, against $1.29B of cash, down from $5.17B.

SMCI · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$11$39$66$94$122 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jun '25Jan '26Aug '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Super Micro assembles servers. It takes NVIDIA and AMD accelerators, Intel processors, memory and storage, and builds them into racks faster than anyone else, because it designs modular building blocks in advance of each chip generation rather than after it. That speed is the entire competitive position. It is not a chip designer and it does not own the scarce component.

The customers are hyperscale and artificial-intelligence data centre operators, and four of them each accounted for more than a tenth of sales last year, against one the year before.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05The shape of the payoff
  6. 06Closing thoughts
  7. 07Methodology

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