MaxLinear reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $168.8 million, up 23% sequentially and 55% year over year, driven by strong demand for its AI data center connectivity portfolio. The semiconductor company said infrastructure revenue increased 145% year over year as hyperscale customers ramp deployments of its Keystone PAM4 DSP platform for 800G optical modules and expand adoption of its optical interconnect products for AI clusters.
The results reflect a significant turnaround in profitability alongside accelerating AI infrastructure demand. GAAP gross margin improved to 57.8%, while non-GAAP operating margin reached 22.3%, up from 7.2% a year earlier. MaxLinear also returned to GAAP profitability with diluted earnings per share of $0.02 and reported non-GAAP EPS of $0.35. CEO Kishore Seendripu highlighted growing production deployments of the company’s optical DSP portfolio supporting both scale-up and scale-out AI networking architectures, while pointing to an expanding roadmap that includes 1.6T-capable products.
Looking ahead, MaxLinear forecast third-quarter revenue between $210 million and $220 million, representing another substantial sequential increase. The company expects non-GAAP gross margin of 58.5% to 61.5%, reflecting continued mix improvement as AI infrastructure products become a larger percentage of revenue. Beyond optical DSPs, MaxLinear continues to supply RF, analog, mixed-signal and connectivity silicon across broadband access, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial markets.
“K2 results underscore the ongoing significant inflection in MaxLinear’s overall business as we delivered 55% year-over-year revenue growth, including 145% growth year over year in our data center-oriented infrastructure revenue,” said Kishore Seendripu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MaxLinear. “The strong momentum in our optical AI data center business reflects the ramp of our Keystone PAM4 DSP platform for 800G applications, as well as the strength of our expanding infrastructure portfolio and roadmap for 1.6T-capable products.”
🌐 Analysis
MaxLinear is becoming increasingly leveraged to AI infrastructure investment rather than its traditional broadband and connectivity markets. The company’s commentary indicates that optical DSPs for pluggable transceivers are now a major growth engine as hyperscale operators expand GPU clusters requiring high-speed optical interconnects at 800G today and 1.6T in future deployments.
The results also reflect the broader shift occurring across the optical networking semiconductor ecosystem. Vendors including Marvell, Broadcom, Coherent, Credo, Astera Labs and MaxLinear continue to report rising demand for AI networking components, particularly DSPs, retimers, interconnect silicon and optical connectivity technologies supporting increasingly dense AI clusters.
