GLOBALFOUNDRIES Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Margin Expansion and Optical Networking Momentum Drive Transformation

Operator: Thank you for standing by. Welcome to GLOBALFOUNDRIES first quarter 2026 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you’ll need to press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you’d like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11 again. As a reminder, today’s program is being recorded. Now I’d like to introduce your host for today’s program, Eric Chow, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Eric Chow, Head of Investor Relations, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to GlobalFoundries first quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call with me today are Tim Breen, CEO, and Sam Franklin, CFO. A short while ago, we released GF’s first quarter 2026 financial results, which are available on our website at investors.gf.com, along with today’s accompanying slide presentation. This call is being recorded and a replay will be made available on our investor relations webpage. During this call, we will present both IFRS and non-IFRS financial measures. The most directly comparable IFRS measures and reconciliations for non-IFRS measures are made available in today’s press release and accompanying slides. Please note that these financial results are unaudited and subject to change. Certain statements on today’s call may be deemed to be forward-looking statements.

Such statements can be identified by the terms such as believe, expect, intend, anticipate and may, or by the use of the future tense. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings, including in sections under the caption Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 20-F and in any current reports on Form 6-K furnished with the SEC. In terms of upcoming events, we look forward to hosting our Investor Day this Thursday, May seventh, with live public webcasts beginning at 9:00 A.M. Eastern Time.

During the event, our leadership team will provide updates on GF strategy, growth initiatives, and long-term outlook, followed by a Q&A session. We will also be participating in fireside chats at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference in Boston on May 19th, and the TD Cowen Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in New York City on May 27th. We will begin today’s call with Tim providing a summary update on the business environment, technologies and end markets, followed by Sam, who will provide details on our first quarter results and second quarter guidance. We will then open the call for questions with Tim and Sam. We request that you please limit your questions to one with one follow-up. I’ll now turn the call over to Tim.

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Thank you, Eric, and welcome everyone to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. GF delivered a strong first quarter with all of our non-IFRS profitability metrics at or above the high end of their respective guidance ranges. This was the result of excellent execution by the team with a focus on delivering for our customers. These results demonstrate a strong step forward in our multi-year journey to enhance the quality of our revenue composition, improve our structural cost position, and achieve efficient scale across our world-class fabs. We have made meaningful traction in secular growth end markets, where our differentiated technology drives share growth and outsized value creation. The first quarter continued to demonstrate proof points of this transformation. We delivered strong double-digit percentage growth in both automotive and comms infrastructure and data center. I am proud of our team’s accomplishments this quarter.

We continue to execute to our proven 3 pillar strategy: to innovate and deliver a unique technology roadmap, to deepen our engagement throughout our customers’ design cycles, and to scale our diverse and fungible global footprint. Let me now update you on our progress on each. First, our unique and innovative technology roadmap. There is no better proof of our technology innovation than with our industry leadership in optical networking, which includes both our silicon photonics and silicon germanium capabilities. With the advent of optical for scale across, scale out, and scale up networks, the market is moving to adopt our solutions for pluggable, near and co-packaged optics.

With process technology leadership, in-house design, assembly, test, and packaging ecosystems, all supported with high volume manufacturing in our advanced 300 millimeter fab footprint, including here in the U.S., we believe no other company has our suite of photonics offerings at our scale. Beyond silicon photonics, we also believe we have robust growth and opportunity within our silicon germanium solutions in the AI data center. SiGe BiCMOS or just SiGe, is another great example of GF’s preparation and foresight meeting a strong positive inflection point in the market. Our SiGe technology is a critical enabler for data center networks where transimpedance amplifiers, TIAs, and drivers using GF solutions support the conversion between high-speed electrical and optical signals. GF SiGe has industry leading FT and Fmax performance. This means faster, cleaner signal amplification, more headroom, and lower data loss across the system.

TIAs and drivers are required on virtually every data center connection, and industry forecasts are anticipating significant unit growth in the coming years. Correspondingly, we are seeing very strong customer demand for our SiGe solutions, with capacity at our Vermont fab oversubscribed through well into 2027. As these SiGe offerings are meaningfully margin accretive to our overall business, we are expanding SiGe capacity to meet the accelerating customer demand. We expect GF SiGe opportunity to be a substantial driver of high quality, long-term revenue growth that complements silicon photonics to form a comprehensive optical networking portfolio. Another notable proof point of GF’s leadership was announced at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference, OFC, in March.

At OFC, founding members of the Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement, or OCI MSA, including AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, established a CPO industry standard for scale-up networks that perfectly aligns with the capabilities GF has spent years developing. This was no accident. Thanks to our proven development and leadership in dense wavelength division multiplexing, or DWDM, GF and our partners provided industry proof points, lending confidence to the OCI founders to define this high standard. As a result, just a month after the OCI standard was announced, yesterday, GF announced its complete optical module solution for NPO and CPO, known as SCALE, or Silicon Photonics Co-packaged Advanced Light Engine. This is not just the industry’s first OCI MSA-capable platform. The technical specs exceed the MSA requirements, supporting our customers’ roadmaps for multiple generations.

For example, SCALE fiber coupling is natively broadband, which enables it to excel at minimizing insertion loss, a key differentiator for CPO. After years of development, including partnering with our customers to design SCALE from the ground up, feedback so far has been excellent. In the first quarter, we saw new tape-outs in Malta, New York, for a pair of CPO design wins that support the new Optical Compute Interconnect, OCI, standard for scale-up networks. We are excited to share more details on SCALE and other developments at our Investor Day on May seventh. At OFC in March, GF made several announcements in conjunction with partners that showcased our robust silicon photonics offerings. Notable highlights included the following.

SENKO and GF demonstrated a wafer-level detachable fiber interface solution for CPO, a critical breakthrough that enables fiber connectivity to be attached and detached through the entire PIC development process for precise and repeatable testing. Together with Corning and EXFO, GF showcased a complete ecosystem of CPO technology, which combined detachable fiber connectivity and automated die-level testing with our high-volume silicon photonics manufacturing. We announced a strategic partnership with Silic Tech to mass-produce 200 gig per lane receiver photonic ICs for pluggable optical transceivers using our process technology. All of these recent developments represent a growing body of proof points for the value our innovative technology roadmap provides. Let me now discuss our second key strategic pillar and provide an update on our customer partnerships and commercial engagements. Thanks to our robust product portfolio and deep partnerships with customers, we continue to accelerate our design win momentum.

In the 1st quarter, we saw a 50% increase in design wins compared to the same period a year ago, with excellent representation across all four major end markets. Not only does this build on the record design win year in 2025, it is another leading indicator of our tape-out and revenue momentum in the years to come. Notable commercial engagements in the quarter included the following highlights. GF and Renesas announced a multi-billion dollar strategic partnership that expands Renesas’ access to GF technologies, including FDX, BCD, and feature-rich CMOS with integrated non-volatile memory. These platforms will support SoCs, power devices, and MCUs for applications such as data center power, advanced driver assistance systems, and secure industrial IoT connectivity. Tape-outs under the broadened collaboration are already underway. We believe this partnership will contribute meaningfully to our continued outperformance and ramp of our data center business over time.

In automotive, we are particularly encouraged by the strong customer momentum around our new auto grade 1 embedded MRAM capability on FDX. This technology offers industry-leading 100 MHz class access times for code execution directly from MRAM, combined with ultra-low power operation and proven endurance and reliability up to 150 degrees C. Our lead customers have taped out with this feature, and as highlighted in our recent announcement, we are seeing growing engagement and traction with tier 1s such as Bosch as this technology moves towards production. This underscores the differentiated value of our FDX platform as automotive customers transition to a next generation of software-defined real-time systems.

In our smart mobile devices end market, we continue to secure additional design wins in the quarter that expand our reach into new applications and emerging form factors that benefit from the features we offer, such as low power, greater reliability, and superior RF performance. For example, in the first quarter, we secured two new design wins on our FDX platform for Micro-LED backplanes used in smart glasses, a fast-growing market only starting to gain adoption. In the realm of robotics and physical AI, in March, GF announced a partnership with Inova Semiconductors to deliver a robotics control reference platform that combines MIPS open RISC-V compute and mixed signal technologies with Inova’s high-speed communication links. This physical AI reference platform will simplify robot design, reduce BOM costs, and accelerate time to market, enabling next gen humanoids and advanced robotics.

Finally, for optical networking reported within our comms infrastructure and data center end market, we saw substantial forward momentum in both customer wins and pipeline. In the first quarter, we executed additional tape outs for silicon photonics that reinforce our confidence that we are on track to roughly double our silicon photonics revenue in 2026, and to achieve greater than $1 billion silicon photonics revenue run rate exiting 2028. GF is now designed in at three of the top four pluggable optical transceiver companies. Customers continue to provide excellent feedback on our suite of pluggable offerings that enable 1.6T solutions as well as a roadmap to 3.2T and beyond. With our proven record of high volume manufacturing at scale, we believe we can sustain a strong growth trajectory in this area for years to come.

Now let me address our third strategic pillar, the value and importance of GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ unique diversified manufacturing footprint. Recent world events have only reinforced the reality that faces business and government leaders around the globe. Concentrated supply chains are now subject to previously unimagined risks. The antidote lies in diversification, flexibility, and security. All three areas that GLOBALFOUNDRIES is uniquely positioned to provide our customers. In a fragmented geopolitical environment, our three continent manufacturing footprint across the U.S., Germany and Singapore is a tremendously valuable asset for our customers. In particular, we have invested for years to cross-qualify fungible capacity across our fab network, meaning a customer need only design with GLOBALFOUNDRIES once and gain the flexibility to manufacture out of three continents. Our one-of-a-kind footprint provides supply chain resilience, closer proximity to end demand, and greater nimbleness to shift supply quickly as market demand changes.

For many of our customers, geographic flexibility is no longer a nice to have, it is a requirement. As a result, we continue to see a meaningful increase in customer engagements and design win activity specifically linked to onshoring. For example, last month, Apple announced a joint collaboration with Cirrus Logic and GF to bring new process technologies to our Malta, N.Y. fab. This marks the first U.S. availability of this silicon platform that supports critical functions in upcoming Apple devices, including next generation components used in Face ID systems. GF is proud to be a founding partner in Apple’s American Manufacturing Program. We see this as another step in a growing partnership and just one notable example of our onshoring value proposition. We are not just partnering with customers to onshore semiconductor supply, we are also working closely with the governments of the U.S., Germany and Singapore.

In the U.S. in particular, support frameworks such as CHIPS grants and investment tax credits are an important element to our long-term strategic roadmap, and we continue to deepen our partnership with the U.S. government, both for capacity growth as well as innovation and technology onshoring. In summary, I’m deeply proud of our team’s execution in this quarter, which advanced GF across all three strategic pillars. With our deep and differentiated technology portfolio, we are reaping the benefits of years of innovation. With our customer-first approach and design enablement capabilities, we remain the partner of choice. With our unique and diversified scaled manufacturing footprint, we are empowering the global onshoring mega trend. All of these place GF at the heart of the industry transformations to come. I’ll now pass the call over to Sam for a deeper dive on first quarter 2026 financials.

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Thank you, Tim. For the remainder of the call, including guidance other than revenue, cash flow, and net interest income, I will reference non-IFRS metrics. GF delivered strong results in the first quarter, with revenue in the high end of the guidance range and gross margin and operating margin well above the high end of the ranges. In particular, our gross margin achieved a first quarter record and grew over 500 basis points year-over-year, representing the biggest expansion in three years. This is testament to our team’s execution and relentless focus on the structural levers driving GF’s sustained improvement in profitability. We believe we’re only in the early stages of this margin expansion opportunity. Before I go deeper into the financials, I’d like to take a moment to update you on some terminology changes to our revenue categorization.

The acquisition of MIPS closed in August 2025, as well as the announced acquisition of the Synopsys ARC IP business, which we expect to close towards the end of the first half of 2026, are both helping to transform GF into a holistic technology solutions provider. As a result, we believe that non-wafer revenue no longer captures the broader reach of our customer offerings, which we expect to include an increasing proportion of revenue from IP, licensing, and software over time. Similarly, wafer revenue is evolving to capture our expanding manufacturing capabilities in custom silicon and advanced packaging, which we will look forward to covering in more detail at our Investor Day on May 7. As a result, revenue previously referred to as wafer revenue will now be categorized as revenue from manufacturing services, and non-wafer revenue will now be categorized as revenue from technology services.

We believe these categories better reflect the depth and breadth of our business model today and going forward. Onto the results. We delivered first quarter revenue of $1.634 billion, down 11% sequentially and up 3.1% year-over-year. We shipped approximately 579,300 millimeter equivalent wafers in the quarter, down 6% sequentially and up 7% from the prior year period. Revenue from manufacturing services accounted for approximately 87% of total revenue. Revenue from technology services, which includes revenue from IP, licensing, software, reticles, non-recurring engineering, expedite fees and other items accounted for approximately 13% of total revenue for the first quarter.

Revenue upside in the quarter for technology services was driven by increased mask and reticles as we ramp customer tape outs, as well as consistent momentum from within IP licensing and software as we integrate the acquisition of MIPS. As the momentum and engagements with customers grow, we expect MIPS to contribute a greater proportion of our technology services revenue going forward at an accretive gross margin to our corporate objectives. All of these factors considered, we expect revenue from technology services to comprise a greater proportion of our total 2026 revenue closer to the high end of our original 10%-12% range. Our early traction here adds to our belief that the technology services portion of our business will be an important long-term driver of durable, high quality, high margin growth. Let me now provide an update on our revenue and outlook by end markets.

Communications infrastructure and data center represented approximately 14% of first quarter total revenue and increased 2% sequentially and 32% year-over-year. This marked the 6th consecutive quarter of double-digit percentage year-over-year growth for communications infrastructure and data center. Within this end market, silicon photonics drove robust growth in the first quarter and remains on track to roughly double in 2026 compared to 2025. In line with our expectations, we saw a healthy revenue contribution from Advanced Micro Foundry, which GF acquired in November of last year. The integration is progressing well as we expand our photonics capabilities at the GF Science Park. Combining GF’s significant scale in Singapore with AMF’s complementary customer base and pluggable photonic solutions for SCALE across networks has expanded our customer momentum in this rapidly growing market.

This acquisition is already gross margin accretive to GF, and we expect to realize even greater growth and profitability tailwinds in the coming years. For these reasons, we now expect to achieve high 30s% year-over-year revenue growth in our communications infrastructure and data center end market in 2026, up from our expectations a quarter ago of approximately 30% year-over-year growth. Automotive represented approximately 23% of first quarter total revenue. Automotive revenue decreased 11% sequentially of a strong fourth quarter and increased 24% year-over-year. In addition to our strong customer share in automotive microcontrollers, we are in the early stage of revenue ramps as a result of our accumulated design wins in smart sensors and networking, as well as vehicle infrastructure.

We are continuing to diversify our offerings to the automotive end market by ramping newly secured sockets in applications such as camera, Ethernet, radar, and power. It is our differentiated technology and disciplined execution that we believe is enabling GF to capture the growing automotive semiconductor content opportunity and outperform peers in this end market. As a result, we expect automotive revenue to deliver low double-digit growth in 2026, its 6th consecutive year of double-digit % growth. Smart mobile devices represented approximately 34% of first quarter total revenue and declined 15% sequentially and 5% from the prior year period. Current industry forecasts for overall smartphone units in 2026 indicate a low double-digit % year-over-year decline.

With approximately 2/3 of our revenue in this end market driven by premium handsets, we expect to see a more contained impact from memory pricing dynamics compared to the broader industry. As such, we expect revenue from smart mobile devices in 2026 to slightly outperform the overall smartphone market with an expected decline in the high single digits %. Beyond the near-term dynamics, we expect smart mobile devices to gradually benefit from the growth of new AI-powered form factors such as smart glasses, hearables, and wearables, where we have nascent growing traction and design wins with our customers. Home and industrial IoT represented approximately 16% of first quarter total revenue and decreased 16% sequentially and 22% year-over-year.

The decline in revenue from this end market in the first quarter was principally driven by the timing of certain customer shipments, a temporary impact which we expect to reverse in the second quarter. Importantly, we continue to expect 2026 to be a growth year for IoT, driven by the normalization of core industrial customer inventory as well as the production ramp of new applications in the second half of 2026, which we believe should contribute to a healthy growth of mid single-digit % year-over-year. Beyond 2026, we expect this end market to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the burgeoning physical AI revolution and serviceable addressable market expansion, where our technology platforms and solutions are well-suited to enable devices to sense, think, act, and communicate.

In summary, we believe that GF’s strong secular growth drivers, including meaningful upside from our recent acquisitions, will help offset smart mobile devices in 2026. As continued growth across the other end markets we serve expand as a % of revenue. These strategic actions are also intended to accelerate our targeted mix shift towards margin-accretive, high-value growth markets and applications. We believe the result over time will be a more durable, more resilient, more profitable business. In the first quarter, we delivered gross profit of $474 million, which translates into approximately 29% gross margin, above the high end of the guidance range and up 510 basis points year-over-year. First quarter saw the largest year-over-year expansion of gross margin in over three years. R&D for the quarter was $114 million, and SG&A was $89 million.

Total operating expenses of $203 million were up 4% quarter-over-quarter and represented approximately 12% of total revenue. We delivered operating profit of $271 million for the quarter at an operating margin of 16.6% above the high end of our guided range and up 320 basis points from the prior year period. First quarter net interest income, net of other expenses, was $5 million, and we incurred tax expense of $49 million in the quarter. We delivered first quarter net income of approximately $227 million, an increase of approximately $38 million from the prior year period. Diluted earnings of $0.40 per share was at the high end of the guidance range based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 561 million shares.

Let me now provide some key cash flow and balance sheet metrics. Cash flow from operations for the first quarter was $542 million. First quarter CapEx, net of proceeds from government grants, was $309 million or roughly 19% of revenue. Adjusted free cash flow for the quarter was $233 million, which represented an adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 14% in the quarter. This outcome was principally driven by favorable working capital movements in the first quarter, which we expect to reverse in the second quarter. At the end of the first quarter, our combined total of cash equivalents, and marketable securities stood at approximately $3.8 billion. Our total debt was $1.1 billion, and we also have a $1 billion revolving credit facility which remains undrawn.

In the first quarter of 2026, we repurchased $400 million of our shares. Of the $500 million share repurchase authorization approved by our board of directors, approximately $100 million remains, and we remain flexible with the deployment of the remaining authorized amount. Capital allocation, planning, and decisions remain tightly linked to visibility, returns, and balance sheet resilience. As we move through 2026, our focus remains consistent. Disciplined capacity investments, structurally improving margins, and cash generation aligned with returns. We will continue to drive momentum in areas that we can control and deliberate in how we allocate capital. Next, let me provide you with our outlook for the second quarter of 2026. We expect total GF revenue to be $1.76 billion ±$20 million.

We expect gross margin to be approximately 28.5% plus or minus 100 basis points, which at the midpoint reflects over 300 basis points of year-over-year gross margin expansion. Excluding share-based compensation, we expect total operating expenses to be $225 million plus or minus $10 million. We are ramping R&D programs in the second half of 2026 to strengthen our technology differentiation and accelerate our roadmap in secular growth areas such as custom silicon photonics, and advanced packaging. Taking into account these investments into R&D and the expected close of the Synopsys ARC IP business acquisition towards the end of the first half of 2026, we expect to maintain a similar quarterly operating expense run rate in the second half of 2026 as indicated in our second quarter guidance.

We expect operating margin to be in the range of 15.7% ±180 basis points. At the midpoint of our guidance, we expect share-based compensation to be approximately $71 million, of which roughly $19 million is related to cost of goods sold. We expect net interest and other for the quarter to be between -$6 million and $2 million and income tax expense to be between $28 million and $48 million. Based on the tax environments across the jurisdictions we operate in, we continue to expect an effective tax rate in the high teens percentage range for full year of 2026. Based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 555 million shares, we expect diluted earnings per share for the first quarter to be $0.43 ±$0.05.

Given the timing of tool delivery windows in order to meet forecast customer demand in critical growth corridors, as well as the timing of government grants, we expect net CapEx to increase in the second quarter. For the full year 2026, we continue to expect non-IFRS net CapEx to be in the range of 15%-20% of revenue. Our CapEx strategy continues to align the sizing and timing of our investments with customer demand while scaling our footprint efficiently. Over the last few years, we have seen notable increases in customer demand for incremental capacity in high growth technology corridors such as silicon photonics, FDX and high performance SiGe. In order to unlock sustainable accretive revenue growth, we are expanding capacity in these areas to support the strong demand signals from our customers. Critically, these targeted CapEx investments are supported by robust partnerships with both customers and governments.

As a result, we expect that the next wave of capacity investments will be accompanied by customer prepayments in addition to meaningful government grant and tax incentive frameworks in all of the geographies we serve. Even with greater investment in enabling capacity in these key growth technology corridors, we continue to expect adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 10% for the full year 2026, with a skew towards the second half. In summary, I’m grateful for our team’s excellent execution this quarter and the strong progress we are making towards our long-term strategic objectives, which are reflected in our financial performance.

We believe GF is at a definitive inflection point, where years of preparation have positioned us well to capitalize on the secular mega trends defining our industry, and we very much look forward to sharing more details with you all at our Investor Day on May 7th. With that, let’s open the call to Q&A. Operator?

Operator: Certainly. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from the line of Harlan Sur from JP Morgan. Your question, please.

Harlan Sur, Analyst, JP Morgan: Yeah, good morning, and thank you for taking my question and congrats on the solid quarterly execution. You know, industry demand trends, even over the past 90 days, have accelerated, especially in areas like AI and data center, where cloud and hyperscale spending continues strong. In non-AI segments, we’re seeing this, you know, broad cyclical recovery profile. On the supply side, advanced flow manufacturers are actually cutting their specialty and mature capacity, and your competitors in specialty and differentiated are signaling wafer pricing increases starting in the second half of this year. I know the team had previously talked about a stable pricing environment this year, but just given the tight supply outlook, continued focus on supply chain resiliency as you guys had outlined, how should we think about your pricing profile as you move through the second half and for the full year?

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah, thank you for the question, Harlan. Good morning. I think the way you can think about it is, you know, differently for different parts of the portfolio. Obviously, there’s a part of our portfolio that prices on a very long-term basis that’s been stable for several years now and continues to be stable going forward. There is a component, a smaller component of the portfolio that prices over a more short-term dynamic. Exactly as you said, both the supply and demand dynamics there are more favorable from a pricing perspective. Consistent with peers, consistent with even many of our customers, we will implement price adjustments on that part of the portfolio. You can imagine those kicking in towards the back end of 2026 and obviously flowing into 2027.

I’ll also add that for parts of our portfolio where we are, you know, capacity constrained and where demand is stronger, we’re also having conversations with customers, not just about pricing, but also about advanced payments to secure capacity as we accelerate our CapEx investments in those tight corridors, such as, you know, FDX, silicon photonics, high-performance silicon germanium. Those customer discussions are very constructive.

Harlan Sur, Analyst, JP Morgan: I appreciate that. Gross margins came in 200 basis points better than your guidance. Mix was certainly a factor, right? Your higher gross margin segments like CID, auto, technology services did better on a sequential basis. For the last question, you know, on industry supply tightness, looks like the team potentially also benefited from sustained or increasing utilization. Maybe you could just help us understand puts and takes around gross margins Q1 here in Q2. Given the better demand mix pricing outlook, how should we think about gross margin trajectory as you move through the second half of the year? Could we see the team as being the year closer to the 33%-35% range?

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Hey, Harlan. Good morning. It’s Sam here. I’ll provide you a little bit of color there. Obviously, we’re very encouraged by where we’re seeing the structural improvements within our gross margin profile. This has been a trend which has been continuing for the last couple of quarters now. Obviously, if you look at things from a year-over-year basis, you know, roughly 3% of revenue growth, but 510 basis points of gross margin. This is something we’ve been positioning for several years. You know, these types of structural levers don’t happen overnight, and they really focus across several areas in the business, namely productivity, cost, continuing, as Tim said, to optimize our footprint from a technology point of view. Mix obviously really matters as well.

If I touch specifically on the first quarter and bridge you a little bit from last year. The single biggest driver there was mix, and mix falls into.

Two categories. It’s the mix as it relates to our manufacturing services, and it’s the mix as it relates to our technology services. You called it out in part of your question, which is, you know, the relative strength of the growth that we’ve seen within those, you know, rich mix environments from, say, for example, a communications infrastructure and data center point of view, which generally falls through at a very high margin relative to our corporate objectives. The same is true for the likes of automotive. That’s contribution from manufacturing services. High rich mix has been important. I’d say as well from a, you know, revenue from technology services perspective, that’s continued to trend actually in the first quarter above the high end of the range that we indicated.

We expect it to be at around 12%. We ended up coming in at 13% of revenue. Part of that is related to the increased contribution we’re seeing from the likes of MIPS and our capabilities in that arena. I’d say that was factored into our guidance. We did see some stronger mask and reticle related revenue within technology services in the first quarter as well. Particularly in the aerospace and defense sector as well. Again, that falls through at a relatively attractive margin as well. You know, we’re quite encouraged from that perspective. I’d say the other dynamic outside of mix is really from a cost perspective. The teams have been focusing maniacally on driving cost and productivity improvements.

As it relates to the 200 basis points that you referenced in the quarter, about 1 point of that came through cost synergies that we’ve been driving from our acquisition of Advanced Micro Foundry in Singapore. You know, that came in certainly more favorable from the perspective of where we were at about 90 days ago. You know, you take that combination of richer mix technology services, favorability from the acquisition we made of AMF, that kind of bridges you to that 200 basis points of outperformance we had relative to the midpoint of our guidance. I think if I fast-forward a little bit to take you into, you know, where we’re looking at the guidance from the second quarter perspective and how we think about things for the remainder of the year.

Look, I’d like to focus a little bit on the year-over-year story here, because I think it really matters in terms of that structural evolution that we’re seeing. At the midpoint of our guidance range, you know, that implies about 330 basis points of year-over-year margin growth. If you take the revenue we delivered in the second quarter of last year, $1.688 billion, you know, we delivered gross profit of about $425 million in the second quarter of last year.

You compare that through to the midpoint of our revenue guided for the second quarter at $1.76 billion. You take that 28.5% midpoint of the range, that implies about $500 million of gross profit delta, which actually corresponds almost fully to the revenue delta. What you’re seeing is a very meaningful pull-through from that increase in revenue relative to the year-over-year margin story there as well. Just on, you know, a couple of the, if you like, the takes as it relates to second quarter and how we’re thinking about some of the rest of the year.

Look, it would be, you know, remiss of us not to be thinking around, you know, how the conflict in the Middle East impacts supply chain and how we proactively drive our supply chain planning decisions around that. We’ve taken some very proactive steps in the first quarter to make sure that we’re shoring up our supplies of key gas and chems like helium, hydrogen, sulfur. Making sure we have that supply chain security is key. Obviously that comes with some incremental costs that we didn’t forecast at the beginning of the year prior to this conflict. Expectation is that that probably has about a half point of margin impact for each quarter as we go through the rest of 2026.

You know, all said and done, we’re quite pleased with the continued year-over-year margin trajectory that we’re seeing. Did you have a follow-up, Harlan?

Harlan Sur, Analyst, JP Morgan: No, very helpful. Thank you. Nope, that was it. I have my two questions. Thank you.

Eric Chow, Head of Investor Relations, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Great. Thank you, Harlan.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya from Bank of America Securities. Your question please.

Vivek Arya, Analyst, Bank of America Securities: Thanks for taking my question. For the first one, I’m curious, how are you benchmarking your growth in comms infrastructure and data center? When I look at a lot of your analog peers or some of the optical customers or AI in general, they’re all growing, you know, anywhere between 50%-100%. High 30% growth is impressive, but how do you know whether you are gaining or losing share relative to the growth rate? Are those growth rates representative of what the industry is growing, or am I comparing apples to oranges here?

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah, thanks for the question, Vivek. I’d say the following. Remember, our CID market consists of three kind of big drivers. Silicon photonics we’ve talked about already, you know, approximately doubling year-on-year. We think that is definitely growing in line with the industry trends and the rollouts, and we even see further acceleration to follow as we launch new products like SCALE that we announced earlier this week. High-performance silicon germanium, you know, equally exhibiting very strong year-on-year growth trajectory. Everything that’s touching optical networking, we’re seeing a very good story. Satcom is also in the CID mix, and that continues to grow very sort of solidly as we see rollout of more LEO capacity and the scale of terminals.

We look at it on a kind of end market, sub-market basis, and in those cases, we don’t see share loss. In fact, we see share gain, in many of those cases. Do you have a follow-up, Vivek?

Vivek Arya, Analyst, Bank of America Securities: Yes. Thank you, Sam. Second question is, you know, kind of another follow-up on pricing and revenue per wafer. When the year started, what did you assume for the pricing environment, and what is it now? I know I’m focusing on just one metric, but revenue per wafer, that continues to decline, and I imagine, you know, that’s probably because of mix or other factors. I would just appreciate your perspective on how are you thinking about industry pricing now versus before, and is your revenue per wafer what should it indicate to us? Because it has continued to decline. Thank you.

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Sure, Vivek. I’ll take that. Obviously Tim gave a little bit of color as part of the last question in terms of how we see the broader pricing environment, particularly in the context of some of those supply-demand constraints that we’ve seen. Look, I’d say one important point to remember around how we think about pricing is that within wafer pricing, we also have what used to be the underutilization payments that flowed through, associated with some of those long-term agreements. You know, that is largely in the rearview mirror, and in fact, we were still getting some of those in the first quarter of 2025. When you think about it from a year-over-year comparison basis, you know, there is a little bit of fallout from that ASP perspective.

You know, the important point, and you touched on mix, which is the right way to think about it, but the way we think about pricing is really the contribution from a margin perspective. You know, the start of the year, we viewed the broader pricing environment as certainly more constructive than it was in 2025. Actually, as we’ve gone through the first quarter, particularly where we see supply constraints on some of our core technology corridors, you know, we remain of the view that it is not only constructive in some of those, favorable tailwinds in some of those technology corridors. You know, from a year-over-year comparison basis and going forward, I would say that the key focus is really around the margin structure that we’re seeing pull through rather than just the standalone pricing.

I hope that helps.

Vivek Arya, Analyst, Bank of America Securities: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of C.J. Muse from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your question please.

C.J. Muse, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Yeah, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. I guess first question was to focus on technology services. Obviously you’re rebranding, changes in mix. Would love to hear how we should think about the growth trajectory here beyond calendar 2026. Is there a framework that we should be thinking about, particularly as Synopsys ARC closes, you know, at the end of the first half of 2026 and your expectations around MIPS and other contributors?

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah. Thank you, CJ. Maybe I’ll start with just kind of, you know, winding back on why we’ve made, you know, this nomenclature change. It really reflects the evolution of our strategy. We renamed wafer revenue to manufacturing services. That’s because, you know, more and more of our end products will be delivered in different form factors. You know, if you take our announcement earlier this week on the optical engine, that’s much more than a wafer. That’s an integrated module. We’ll see more and more of that across our portfolio. It felt more appropriate to describe that as manufacturing services. In the technology services bucket which you asked about, that’s also growing. What that used to represent is really just the complements to the wafer revenue, the masks, the reticles, the NRE that went along with it.

With some of the acquisitions we’ve made, we increasingly see, you know, areas like IP, software, you know, some of that customization and value add services that really enable us to work more deeply with our customers. I’ll let Sam talk about how that range will trend over time. Obviously we see increased growth based on the acquisitions that we’ve made.

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Sure. Thanks, Tim and CJ. You know, we’re definitely gonna dive more into this as part of the day when we get together on Thursday. I won’t preview too much, but to Tim’s point, you know, putting all of that together in terms of the composition of revenue from technology services, you’ll recall that we used to guide that to the neighborhood of sort of 8%-10%. We were typically around that 10% midpoint. As we’ve seen this evolution and the increase in complementary services within our technology services, our expectation is that that trends more to the high end of the 10%-12% range that we indicated at the start of this year.

You know, obviously we’re in the early innings of integrating MIPS, and we haven’t yet reached close on the Synopsys ARC IP business. Again, as we ramp those over time and as we create more offerings for our customers in the IP, the software, the custom silicon solutions, we’d expect that to drive incremental growth over time.

C.J. Muse, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Very helpful. I guess as a follow-up, wanted to focus on silicon photonics. You announced a new platform. You gave pretty robust outlook exiting calendar 2028. Expected, I think, revenues to double to $400 million here in calendar 2026. Would love to get a sense of how you see kind of the product mix evolving over time. My sense is the lion’s share of the revenues today are pluggables, but would love to get an understanding of how you see that pattern changing as we go into 2027, 2028.

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah. Thank you, CJ. I mean, I think the broader picture is you know, extremely strong adoption of optical across the industry. You know, we hear stats like by 2030, 70% of networking ports in a data center will be optical, and that reflects, you know, the complexity of compute and the sheer amounts of data that AI workloads require. I think the optical momentum is clearly building. I think there will continue to be good discussion about the form factors. Pluggables are in high demand today, growing fast and also evolving with new features and new data rates with 1.6T going into the market today, and 3.2 and others on the roadmap, including for us.

I think the evolution to near and co-packaged optics is still very much, if anything, accelerating. And we heard at OFC this year many companies come out with their plans, and also this adoption of industry standards indicates ways that the industry can coalesce around a number of kind of more typical approaches to make those products, you know, consistent and accelerate the adoption. We’ve always been of a view that sort of co-packaged optics is a 2028 story. I think that remains the case. What we have said is that we are already seeing tapeouts of products that are intended for co-package and near package optic use, and that’s already happening today. I think that confidence level on that rollout is definitely increasing.

C.J. Muse, Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Krish Sankar from TD Cowen. Your question please.

Krish Sankar, Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the strong results. Tim, just to stay on the topic of silicon photonics, is there a way you can compare and contrast your SCALE optical solution with TSMC’s COUPE or Tower Semiconductor’s offerings? Any color on the nanometer nodes of the logic or optical photonics, advanced packaging, et cetera, would be helpful.

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: No, thanks for the question, Krish. We’re gonna go into a lot more detail on this this week on Thursday at our Investor Day. I think it merits not just a longer discussion, but also some slides to make it a bit more visual as well. I mean, we’ve been working on co-packaged optics for more than 10 years, and a lot of what we announced this week is based on technologies that we’ve developed at the wafer level, but also around advanced packaging, you know, things like hybrid bonding, TSVs. Some of the announcements we made about the ability to have fiber attached that is able to deliver low insertion loss light into the chip while still maintaining, you know, maintainability of those devices so you can service them.

All of these are some of the innovations we’ve worked on, and you’ll find a lot of them written about in that OCI MSA. We think we have an industry leading solution. It benchmarks very well to competition. More broadly, you know, this is a fast-growing market and destined to be very large. Of course, there will be multiple solutions in the market. I think we’re very confident in our ability to be, you know, amongst those leaders for the foreseeable future.

Krish Sankar, Analyst, TD Cowen: That was very helpful, Tim. Just a quick follow-up, maybe you’ll talk about this more on Thursday as well. On the MIPS IP strategy, how do you think about it given the RISC-V processor IP, custom silicon software angles? I remember in the past you mentioned that the MIPS technology service revenue could be a $100 million plus business this year. Is that still the ZIP code to think about?

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah. Look, we’ve, you know, mentioned this before a little bit, but just to comment on it, we’re seeing very, very good customer feedback to MIPS and even more positive feedback when we announced the Synopsys ARC transaction, which as Sam mentioned, is set to close within the first half. I think the reason is that customers, you know, love the idea of a company with GLOBALFOUNDRIES scale, with GLOBALFOUNDRIES’s kind of reliability through the cycle providing that IP. I think with the increased adoption of RISC-V, especially in those real world workloads, right? Think, you know, automotive, think AI at the edge, think about things like radar that require, you know, different kind of processor technologies. There’s a real market need for RISC-V.

I think what also customers are appreciating is the ability for us to engage earlier in that design cycle. We can talk about their optimization of their products. We can give them software tools to simulate those early on, well before we’re talking about manufacturing decisions. It’s also enabling us to have a deeper conversation and increase our chances of being that partner of choice when we get to the manufacturing ramp. That’s highly synergetic and it’s changing the nature of the conversations with customers.

I think the last pie-piece that’s worth calling out is having internally these capabilities also gives us a chance to, if you like, taste our own cooking, and push our process technologies further, not just today, but also in our longer term roadmap, because we’re able to, you know, with short learning loops, basically push the limits of what we can do in our process technologies for those key applications. You know, I’m very, very bullish, not just about the financial trajectory of these acquisitions, but also on the strategic value. I’ll let Sam comment about where we are for the year.

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Sure. Thanks, Tim. Krish, to the second part of your question in terms of, you know, how we think about the revenue contribution from MIPS in 2026. Look, we provided some guidance, actually at the start of this year and also at the end of last year when we did our physical AI webinar that we expected about $60 million-$100 million of revenue contribution associated with MIPS in 2026. That range still holds, what I would say is that, you know, we feel like the momentum with customers, as Tim said, is progressing very well. The bookings are progressing very well. You know, we’re sort of trending towards above the midpoint of that range that we indicated at the start of this year.

Obviously, that’s before we factor in the timing of the close associated with the Synopsys ARC IP business. That will come later, and we’ll probably be able to give a bit more color on the contribution from that perspective when we get to our next earnings call.

Krish Sankar, Analyst, TD Cowen: Thanks a lot, Tim. Thanks, Sam.

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Thanks, Chris.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Bryson from Wedbush Securities. Your question please.

Matthew Bryson, Analyst, Wedbush Securities: Yeah, thanks for letting me ask a question this morning. For the comms and data center side of things, you’ve highlighted solid opportunities in silicon photonics, SiGe. But can you talk a bit more explicitly around whether there were any specific factors that drove the upside versus your prior guide?

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Thanks, Matt. Look, I think it’s incremental across the board. You know, we’re seeing for sure the demand for optical networking picking up. I think there’s a lot of momentum behind that adoption. That’s, you know, as we mentioned earlier, pulling through to pluggable optical transceivers. If I could show you an X-ray of a pluggable optical transceiver, you’d find in it high performance silicon photonics. You’d also find some of that high performance SiGe content that we talked about. Those two, I think, are the contributors to the increased confidence in the revenue trajectory within that end market. The other parts remain solid and growing well like Satcom. I think the optical piece is the one that I would call out.

Matthew Bryson, Analyst, Wedbush Securities: Awesome. Just a follow-up on that. Higher growth in the segment, I mean, it seems to be favorable for margins. Beyond the higher cost you’ve outlined tied to the geopolitical events, are there any potential offsets we should maybe think about, like additional CapEx to support the corridors that are tight? Is the shift in mix largely just an unmitigated positive for gross margins?

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah, look, I’d probably break that down, Matt, into sort of near-term horizon and longer term, and we’ll obviously get into some of the longer term when we get together on Thursday. The expectation from a CapEx point of view at the beginning of this year was that we’d be in the zip code of 15%-20%, that CapEx to revenue. That already contemplated some of the increasing demand that we’ve been seeing come through on the likes of high-performance SiGe, photonics, FDX. We’d already sized our overall CapEx envelope at the start of this year to really factor some of that in. I would say one other point which I mentioned earlier from a margin point of view, we have seen strong cost synergies come through with the acquisition and continued integration of AMF.

That is proving to be a good business, not just accreted from a margin point of view, but growing our offering to customers within the photonics space. Yeah, you’re right to call out some of that cost headwind, but, you know, we’ve generally felt that we can see some offsets from that associated with the mix dynamics. Look, our target for the full year is still to exit 2026, you know, at or above a 30% gross margin.

Matthew Bryson, Analyst, Wedbush Securities: Awesome. Thanks, Dan, and congrats on those strong results.

Eric Chow, Head of Investor Relations, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Thank you, Matt. Maybe if I can add on the CapEx side, I think as you’re seeing, you know, our principles of where we spend our CapEx are very much linked to where we see, you know, strong conviction in customer demand. It’s in those corridors that are oversubscribed today. When you should think about that CapEx, the ROI is very strong because we’re adding tools to existing footprints and able to bring capacity on very quickly. By the way, we do that in sites where we have in place strong government support frameworks. Especially for these technologies, there’s a lot of government support to build out capacity in the U.S. and around the world.

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: You know, even though that CapEx comes through at a, at a significantly lower kinda net pull-through, once you consider those government partnerships as well.

Matthew Bryson, Analyst, Wedbush Securities: Got it. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Our final question for today comes from the line of Ross Seymore from Deutsche Bank. Your question please.

Ross Seymore, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Hi, guys. Thanks for letting me ask a question and sneaking me in. One near-term one longer term. On the near-term side of things, you guys were helpful for the full year on the revenues by segment. I think you mentioned that the home IoT is likely to rebound in the second quarter. Any other kind of even directional guidance for the sub-segments between the manufacturing and the technology services by end market for 2Q?

Sam Franklin, Chief Financial Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Yeah. Look, I’d probably, Ross, draw your attention to start with in terms of, you know, how we’re seeing this evolution from a revenue composition and a diversification point of view, because that kind of becomes a little bit of the layup as to how we see the opportunities, not just in the second quarter, but as we go through the year from an end market point of view. And look, it’s an important point to note that in the first quarter, the contribution of revenue from all of the end markets and technology services outside of smart mobile devices, you know, that came in at the highest level that we’ve had as a company, roughly two-thirds of our total revenue.

You know, that gradual mix shift, not just from a technology point of view, but from an end market point of view, has been several years in the making, and we’re really seeing that come through in the first quarter, and our expectation is that continues through the rest of this year. You know, as it relates to the specific quarter-on-quarter dynamics, you know, I’d say that we do continue to expect good year-over-year momentum as it relates to comms, infra, and data center. You know, automotive, as I said, IoT should reverse some of those dynamics we saw in Q1.

The general, you know, offset to that, which we touched on in the prepared remarks in the Q&A, is really around smart mobile devices, where, you know, from 90 days ago, we’re seeing more kind of high single-digit decline year-over-year. Putting it all together, we think that those declines are offset by the momentum we’re seeing in the other end markets.

Ross Seymore, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Perfect. I guess my one longer-term question is a perfect segue from what you just said on smart mobile devices. I realize what that end market’s doing, it’s nice to see you guys outperforming it, relatively speaking. How do you see the performance of GlobalFoundries in that business relative to the end market over time? Can you increase that delta so you outperform by more, or is it just is what it is and that might be a kind of year-over-year headwind more structurally going forward as an overall segment?

Tim Breen, Chief Executive Officer, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Ross, we’ll share, you know, significantly more on that this Thursday, because obviously, you know, the objective is to go a bit further out in time. I think you’re seeing some tailwinds when it comes to content growth within the handset. You’re also seeing new form factors that bring content. Let me give an example, like smart glasses. You know, I’m a personal strong believer that form factor will see the light of day and will grow and will become commonplace. That requires new technologies, things like backplane for display, microLEDs, things that we’ve been working on with partners for some time. I think there are some tailwinds.

We’ll say more about the overall end market on Thursday, but I think it’s too early to count out that category as a driver for the future.

Ross Seymore, Analyst, Deutsche Bank: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today’s program. I’d like to hand the program back to Eric Chow for any further remarks.

Eric Chow, Head of Investor Relations, GLOBALFOUNDRIES: Great. Thank you, Jonathan. Thanks everyone for joining today. We are very excited to see you at our Investor Day on May seventh. We’ll also be at J.P. Morgan Conference on May nineteenth and the Cowen Conference on May twenty-seventh. Thanks everyone for joining. I appreciate your interest in the company.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.