Blaize Holdings Reports Q1 2026 Results: Full Earnings Call Transcript

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Blaize Holdings (NASDAQ:BZAI) held its first-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.

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The full earnings call is available at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/fk52zf2i/

Summary

Blaize Holdings reported Q1 2026 revenue of $2.7 million, reflecting a 170% year-over-year increase despite a global memory shortage impacting server availability.

The company reaffirmed its full-year 2026 revenue guidance of $130 million and anticipates a back-half weighted revenue distribution due to the timing of large orders and data center expansion.

Strategic initiatives include expanding the Neotensor contract to a potential $70 million value, launching Blaze AI Services starting with a Face Recognition AI service, and establishing partnerships with Winmate and Nokia for AI innovation and infrastructure development.

Blaize Holdings closed a $35 million equity offering to strengthen its balance sheet, support commercial commitments, and advance AI Services development and platform advancement.

Management highlighted the transition to higher-margin, recurring revenue from AI services and emphasized the strategic focus on hybrid AI infrastructure to meet the shifting market towards sovereign AI and edge deployment.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Blaze first quarter 2026 earnings 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 the session you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised to withdraw your question. Please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Lana Adair, Investor Relations Please go ahead.

Lana Adair (Investor Relations)

Before we begin the prepared remarks, we would like to remind you that earlier today Blaze Holdings Inc. Issued a press Release announcing its first quarter 2026 results. Earnings Materials are available on the Investor Relations section of Blaze Holding, Inc. S website. Today’s earnings call and press release reflect management’s views as of today only and include statements related to our 2020 financial guidance, revenue, gross margin, competitive position, anticipated industry trends, market opportunities, products and financing opportunities, all of which constitute forward looking statements under the federal securities laws. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in or implied by these forward looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could impact our actual results and please refer to the company’s Form 10K and amendment number one to Form 10K for the year ended December 31, 2025 and our Form 10Q for the period ending March 31, 2026, including the risk Factors section therein and today’s press release, both of which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Any forward looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and other than as may be required by law. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information for future events. Information discussed on this call concerning Blaize Holdings, Inc. Industry competitive position and the markets in which it operates is based on information from independent industry and research organizations, other third party sources and management’s estimates. These estimates are derived from publicly available information released by independent industry analysts and other third party sources as well as data from Blaze Holding, Inc. S internal research. These estimates are based on reasonable assumptions and computations made upon reviewing such data and Blaize Holdings, Inc. S experience in and knowledge of such industry and markets. By definition, assumptions are subject to uncertainty and risks which could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in the estimate. During this call we will discuss certain non GAAP financial measures. These non GAAP financial measures should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for measures prepared in accordance with gaap for a reconciliation of non GAAP financial measures discussed during this call to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to today’s press release. Now I’d like to turn the call over to Dinakar Munagala, CEO of Blaze Holdings, Inc.

Dinakar Munagala (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you, Lana and good afternoon everyone. We came off a breakout growth year in 2025 and we expect 2026 to continue the trend. Q1 strengthened our commercial foundation through several new contracts and partnerships. First, we expanded our Neotensor contract, bringing the total potential value to $70 million. We signed a strategic partnership agreement with Winmate, a publicly traded leader in ruggedized computing, with the intent to close approximately $15 million in business in the first year. We deepened our joint engagement with Nokia across Asia Pacific. Together we stood up a joint AI Innovation Lab advancing hybrid AI RAC scale development. The engagement also includes a strategic partnership with Datacom, one of Southeast Asia’s leading cloud service providers. Finally, we announced Blaize AI Services and will bring our first application service to market. Q1 revenue came in at approximately $2.7 million. This reflects a global memory shortage that limited server availability from one of our trusted suppliers and delayed orders. Customer demand remained intact throughout the quarter. We expect to secure the inventory needed to deliver over $11 million to a single customer in the second quarter of this year and we are reaffirming our full year 2026 revenue guidance of $130 million at JITEX AI 2026 in April, one of the largest AI showcases in Asia, we announced Blaize AI Services which we expect to turn AI infrastructure into production ready APIs that cloud service providers, data center operators and system integrators can deploy, monetize and resell. Today we are going to announce the next step in execution, the upcoming launch of our Face Recognition AI service, the first in a series of application level services running on the Blaze hybrid AI platform. Why this matters AI Services will complement our hardware sales with recurring application layer revenue per query. It’s higher margin, it’s stickier and it scales with our partners growth not just with their capex cycle. Face Recognition is the first proof point. Additional high demand services including intelligent document processing will follow. We have signed a contract with Neotensor that is expected to generate up to $50 million in revenue in the first year. This builds on more than $20 million in revenue that we recognized in Q4 of 2025, bringing the total potential value to approximately $70 million. The development uses a co branded AI server built on Blaze Quad card. Each server handles 200 plus simultaneous camera streams with advanced AI analytics while running LLM and VLM inference on the same infrastructure. This is what our hybrid AI architecture was built for. Real time perception at the sensor layer, Advanced reasoning on the same rack no round trip to a distant cloud. The rollout is expected to span multiple cities across Asia Pacific in multiple phases. Each phase is expected to drive higher margin revenue as the AI services layer takes hold. Earlier this month we entered into a strategic agreement with winmate. Together we will integrate Blaze AI into ruggedized systems, drones, handhelds, vehicle mounted units and embedded devices for mission critical operations, border security, maritime essential infrastructure and field healthcare. Beyond the contracts I just described, we are advancing a series of RAC scale hybrid AI engagements anchored by our joint partnership with Nokia. This work reaches cloud service providers and infrastructure partners. These opportunities are multi site multi phase with hundreds to thousands of edge nodes per program. They span Spark, City, Sovereign Data center and large scale ruggedized field use cases. The architecture is hybrid GSP plus GPU at RAC scale orchestrated by Blaize AI Services stack. The pattern is consistent. Customers want sovereign control of their data. They want efficiency. They want application level AI services. They can resell hybrid AI delivers all three Stepping Back the AI infrastructure conversation is shifting fast. A year ago the industry was focused on one thing massive centralized GPU clusters for training. Today the conversation moved decisively toward sovereign language model inference at the edge in country at unit economics that actually work at scale. That shift is what Blaze was built for. Three Pillars Number one Sovereign AI Infrastructure Governments and large enterprises across Asia, Middle east and Europe demand compute that stays within their borders under their control. Hybrid Rackscale enables this without HyperScaler Economics. Number two Smaller LLM based AI services. Most enterprise AI workloads do not need a frontier model. They need a tightly tuned domain specific model on infrastructure they can afford. Our hybrid architecture runs vision and language workloads on the same rack, opening the service revenue our partners can monetize per query. Number three Programmable energy efficient compute. This is where the Blaze GSP advantage compounds performance per watt Deterministic latency a software stack that serves vision, LLM and VLM workloads on the same hardware. Hybrid Rackscale is the unit of deployment for the next phase of AI. We are building toward it and our partners are buying in. On May 6th we closed a $35 million equity offering supported by a group of large institutional investors. This capital strengthens our balance sheet. The proceeds will support our commercial deal commitments, continued AI Services development, RAC Scale Hybrid Platform Advancement and Next Generation Platform development. Blaze is a company executing against one of the most significant opportunities in AI history. RAC Scale Hybrid AI Sovereign infrastructure the strategic path for recurring AI services Revenue and partnerships that put Blaze at the center of the AI inference build out Contracts are expanding, partnerships are deepening across an increasingly diverse base of AI use cases and finally, engagements are advancing in the field. So with that I’ll turn it over to our cfo Harminder Samey.