Astera Labs, Super Micro, others give off positive vibes at OCP Summit: Needham

Research firm Needham attended the Open Compute Project Summit and came away incrementally more positive on several semiconductor and artificial intelligence-related companies, including Astera Labs (NASDAQ:ALAB), Credo Technology (NASDAQ:CRDO), Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ:LSCC), Semtech (SMTC) and Super Micro Computer (NASDAQ:SMCI).

Astera Labs

Noting that the company’s booth was “packed” all three days, Astera is seen benefiting from the recent introduction of the Scorpio fabric switch family, analyst N. Quinn Bolton said.

“The company’s P-Series switch family is comprised of 4-port, 64-lane PCIe Gen 6/5 switches, optimized to switch x16 lanes for AI head node applications,” Bolton wrote in a note to clients. “The X-Series delivers the highest backend scale-up bandwidth with support for platform-specific customizations to enhance performance in homogeneous GPU-to-GPU clusters. While we await additional details on the X-Series family, which may be announced in the coming weeks, we believe there will be two branches of the X-Series switches.”

Bolton, who has a Buy rating on Astera and upped his price target to $80 from $65, said the attachment rate for P-Series switches is likely to be one-to-one for each Nvidia (NVDA) Blackwell GPU in a server, which should increase the opportunity between two and four times.

“Based on conversations with Astera, we believe management is confident in its design win position with both Series-P and Series-X switches,” Bolton added.

Credo Technology

Bolton also upped his price target on Credo after the event, noting that demand from Amazon (AMZN) for its AEC cables is “robust” and the other hyperscalers remain the same.

“Based on our meetings with management at OCP, we believe demand from Amazon remains robust and the outlook from Microsoft and its third hyperscaler customer remain status quo,” Bolton wrote. “Specifically, we expect Amazon revenue to reaccelerate in F2H25, Microsoft revenue to recover strongly in F2H25 and the third hyperscaler to ramp before the end of FY25. Overall, we come away from our meetings with Credo at OCP with increased conviction in the company’s near-term and intermediate-term AEC outlook and the prospects for its entry into the PCIe retimer market.”

Bolton upped his price target on Credo to $43 from $33 and reiterated his Buy rating.

Lattice Semiconductor

The visit with Lattice highlighted two interesting data points, Bolton said: the fact the company has “meaningful” field programmable gate arrays content in Nvidia’s NVL72 racks and that Aspeed’s PFR ASIC solution does not support the post-quantum cryptography standards.

“With Lattice having meaningful content on NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform, we believe the company’s valuation multiple may expand,” Bolton wrote. Bolton has a Buy rating and $61 price target on Lattice.

Semtech

Semtech should benefit from Nvidia’s increased usage of copper, Bolton said. Bolton has a Buy rating and $50 price target on Semtech.

Super Micro

The focus of most of Super Micro’s presentations during the conference were the shift to liquid cooled data centers, which the company has been a leader in, Bolton said.

“After attending OCP, we are incrementally more positive on the liquid cooling market and view Supermicro as well positioned to capitalize on this significant industry transition,” Bolton wrote. He has a Buy rating and $60 price target on Super Micro.