Astera Labs

Astera just posted a record 308 million dollars in quarterly revenue, up 93% year over year and 14% in just one quarter. They are guiding next quarter to 360 million dollars at the midpoint, which would be another 17% jump in 90 days. Gross margins came in at a stunning 76%, putting them in the same league as the most profitable chip companies on the planet.

Astera just started shipping the Scorpio X-Series 320-lane fabric switch, the largest open AI switch ever built, and it targets a market projected to hit 20 billion dollars by 2030. The expanded Scorpio P-Series PCIe 6 family now spans 32 to 320 lanes, with broader volume ramps coming in 2027. Combined with NVIDIA's NVLink Fusion partnership and the Amazon equity stake, Astera is the rare neutral connectivity vendor working with both the biggest GPU maker and the biggest cloud company.

Astera trades at one of the richest valuations in the entire chip industry, with the market pricing in years of triple digit growth and continued share gains. Even with revenue nearly doubling, the bar to clear keeps rising. Any deceleration in AI capex spending would compress that multiple sharply, even if the business itself stays healthy.

A handful of hyperscalers drive almost all of Astera's revenue, and the Amazon equity stake, while strategic, does not stop Microsoft or Google from going elsewhere. Broadcom, Marvell, and even the hyperscalers themselves could build similar connectivity silicon in house. Next quarter's guidance also calls for gross margins to step down to 73%, a reminder that the product mix is shifting as switches scale up.