Synopsys reported a strong Q1 with revenue at the high end and EPS above guidance, driven by strong Ansys performance. Management reiterated FY26 revenue and margin guidance while raising EPS on lower interest expense, and noted a tale of two markets with robust AI/HPC demand offset by weak automotive/industrial and China headwinds. Q1 revenue was $2.41B at the high end of guidance, with Ansys contributing $886M.
Buzzberg readQ1 revenue at high end, EPS above guidanceSynopsys reported a strong Q1 with revenue at the high end and EPS above guidance, driven by strong Ansys performance. Management reiterated FY26 revenue and margin guidance while raising EPS on lower interest expense, and noted a tale of two markets with robust AI/HPC demand offset by weak automotive/industrial and China headwinds. Q1 revenue was $2.41B at the high end of guidance, with Ansys contributing $886M.Read full analysisCollapse analysis
Synopsys reported a strong Q1 with revenue at the high end and EPS above guidance, driven by strong Ansys performance. Management reiterated FY26 revenue and margin guidance while raising EPS on lower interest expense, and noted a tale of two markets with robust AI/HPC demand offset by weak automotive/industrial and China headwinds. Q1 revenue was $2.41B at the high end of guidance, with Ansys contributing $886M.
Backlog of $11.3B provides revenue visibility.
FY26 EPS guidance raised by $0.06 to $14.38-$14.46 due to lower interest expense.
Management sees muted IP growth in FY26 with a Q4-weighted recovery driven by delivering delayed titles and monetization improvements.
ANSYS revenue$0.886B
reported
Revenue$2.4088B
reported
EPS$3.77
reported
Gross margin73.54%
reported
What changed this quarter
01
Guidance
Q1 revenue at high end, EPS above guidance
Guidance · revenue to $9.61B
02
AI
AI is amplifying strategic advantage, not disrupting
Management frames AI as a demand tailwind for its hardware, EDA, and Ansys portfolios, not a disruption, and emphasizes its own AI-driven design products (e.g. Synopsys.ai) delivering productivity gains and advancing agent engineers, with early customer engagements and a…
03
Competitive Position
Marquee emulation win at leading AI HPC customer
Backlog of $11.3B provides revenue visibility.
04
Product Roadmap
First joint Synopsys+Ansys solutions to be delivered in 2026
FY26 EPS guidance raised by $0.06 to $14.38-$14.46 due to lower interest expense.
AI, capex & demand read
AI
Platform & monetization
Management frames AI as a demand tailwind for its hardware, EDA, and Ansys portfolios, not a disruption, and emphasizes its own AI-driven design products (e.g. Synopsys.ai) delivering productivity gains and advancing agent engineers, with early customer engagements and a value-based monetization opportunity.
Demand
Bookings & conversion
Guidance is raised on EPS due to lower interest expense; reiteration of the rest signals confidence in the full-year despite muted IP; margins and revenue outlook are stable to improving.
Capex
Investment and capacity
Capex guidance is held at approximately $300 million for the full year, with a focus on investing in the business alongside debt paydown and opportunistic share repurchases.
Tone · Confident
Management consistently highlights record/marquee wins, strong backlog, and an accelerating technology roadmap, while reiterating or raising guidance.
Bottlenecks
Manufacturing capacity
So your question about front-end and the back-end, we're working absolutely on both, where the early opportunity that we're seeing, and we're tackling it because of the bottleneck that our customers, they do see, in terms of time and number of engineers they put, is in the front-
“So your question about front-end and the back-end, we're working absolutely on both, where the early opportunity that we're seeing, and we're tackling it because of the bottleneck that our customers, they do see, in terms of time and number”
Design IP revenue was down 6% YoY, but management is confident in Q4-weighted revenue due to catching up on delayed titles for hyperscalers, not on market recovery.
“our confidence in the second half waiting is coming through the roadmap alignment and by when do we deliver on these titles”
China remains a 'tale of two markets,' with Synopsys classic down slightly despite Ansys growth; domestic competitors are winning where export controls prevent Synopsys, but existing customers still prefer Synopsys where available.
“if customers cannot use our technology, they're looking for alternatives. And the customers who can use the technology, they absolutely still prefer to use our technology versus domestic”
Synopsys is developing a monetization shift from time-based to value-based licensing for its agentic AI, and expects to sign deals in FY26 but revenue only after customer tape-outs.
“the workflow will change and there will be a monetization adjustment. And the customers, by the way, they're very receptive”
Backlog remains at $11.3B, providing visibility but with a potential shift towards hardware and Ansys deals; classic EDA software growth depends on renewal timing.
“We feel great. We are sitting at $11.3 billion of backlog, so we've got a strong... understanding of what our customer demands”
… on critical tape-outs at 2 nanometer and below. Moving to ANSYS, which delivered a strong Q1 performance driven by robust demand for system-level digital engineering, multi-physics simulation, and AI-enabled design flows. We won large multi-year agreements across aerospace, hyperscale, industrial, and automotive. With ENSYS as part of Synopsys, we now support more than 90% of the top 100 automotive suppliers. And at CES in January, we showcased how AI-driven simulation is helping customers like Audi reduce physical prototyping and shorten development cycles. Our confidence in this business is only increasing as global demand for electrification, autonomy, digital twins, advanced semiconductor design, and mission engineering remains resilient and expanding. Turning to design IP, which performed in line with expectations. As we've said, 2026 is a transitional year for the IP business, and we're focused on aligning the fastest growing segments of the silicon market. We're making progress on this front. The planned sale of our processor IP solutions business to global foundries sharpens our focus on extending our leadership positions in interconnect and foundation IP. As …
… deliver optimal, deterministic, silicon proven results that probabilistic AI models do not replicate. While AI will transform engineering software, Synopsys is already leading that transformation. We're pioneering AI driven design capabilities in our products, that deliver orders of magnitude productivity gains for our customers and pave the way for agent engineers with increasing levels of autonomy. One highlight among many this quarter was receiving World Economic Forum honors for our work with AMD to advance AI accelerated chip design. AI isn't disrupting our business. it's amplifying our strategic advantage. Another market trend and tailwind for Synopsys is the engineering transformation away from physical testing towards digital twins. To build more connected products at pace and at scale, companies are investing in advanced design automation simulation, and digital twins as a competitive imperative. There is incredible demand for silicon-to-system solutions that can enable holistic software-hardware co-design to accelerate, de-risk, and reduce the cost of building AI-powered products. Our combined Synopsys plus Ansys portfolio is increasingly …
Partnership on GPU acceleration and Omniverse is deep; joint R&D to run Synopsys products on NVIDIA GPUs expected to deliver in 2026, with added monetization uplift.
Thank you. Good evening. So seeing the first question for you and perhaps somewhat technical, you began your remarks by noting how AI could be variously constructive to your business rather than disruptive. And I happen to agree with that. But I'd like to ask about three ingredients that you might have to execute upon to make sure that continues to be the case. We hear a lot, for example, about orchestration requirements across agentic AI. I think that's probably going to be pertinent to EDA as well, or engineering software broadly. Secondly, data repository across a broad apps portfolio that you now have. And then finally, traceability, particularly for simulation, but also more broadly.…
Yeah, Jay, thank you for the question. If you recall last year at Converge, we put our roadmap for agent engineers. And in that roadmap, we mapped out L1 through L5, where L1, think of it as a reinforcement learning applied to every aspect of the the technology that we offer. In L2, where we have what we call a task agent. In L3, into orchestration of these agents. In L4, into the planning, et cetera, into a full autonomy of orchestration where the human engineer will be dramatically augmented and the workflow will change on how to design the chip. Now, what stitches all of that together is a visibility and continuum of data, exactly the second point that you're mentioning. And then, of course, the traceability, visibility into the accuracy of the verification. Because at the end of the day, what we do, our agents cannot hallucinate. They have to be 100% accurate as you move to the next phase and the following phase of the workflow. We have number of the tasks agents and we have multiple orchestration layer. And we talked about these through some of our partnerships we have with Nvidia, with Microsoft, et cetera, to leverage some of that orchestration layer and the cognitive layer that they offer. So it's a combination of what we're building and what we're partnering with the ecosystem in order to accelerate our roadmap on the vision of an agent engineer, which we believe strongly that we have pioneered, and we continue on engaging the customers there. But I want to make sure that it's clear as well, in order to deliver to that vision, you need the data and you need the verification ability of every step of the flow.
… cycles. Our confidence in this business is only increasing as global demand for electrification, autonomy, digital twins, advanced semiconductor design, and mission engineering remains resilient and expanding. Turning to design IP, which performed in line with expectations. As we've said, 2026 is a transitional year for the IP business, and we're focused on aligning the fastest growing segments of the silicon market. We're making progress on this front. The planned sale of our processor IP solutions business to global foundries sharpens our focus on extending our leadership positions in interconnect and foundation IP. As interconnect standards evolve at an unprecedented pace, customers count on Synopsys' one generation ahead approach, and in Q1, we saw continued strong demand for high-speed protocol IP. We achieved more than 40 PCIe design wins in the quarter with HPC and automotive customers, achieved an industry-first demonstration of PCIe 8.0, and established first-to-market position with our 224-gig SERDs on advanced nodes and leading foundries with 10 lifetime wins. We continue to expect muted FY26 growth in IP with sequential improvement given our roadmap and sales …
ANTHROPIC
Private company
Supply chain
Management explicitly contrasts its deterministic solvers against probabilistic AI model companies, suggesting it views such AI firms as providing substitutes, not solutions.
… and industrial remain subdued despite signals of modest recovery. AI's rapid progress is also prompting healthy debate about whether it will disrupt established software companies. Let me explain why we're different. Our deep tech solutions power the world's most complex engineering efforts. Synopsis decades of deep domain expertise, proprietary code basis and solvers. and native foundry design technology co-optimizations deliver optimal, deterministic, silicon proven results that probabilistic AI models do not replicate. While AI will transform engineering software, Synopsys is already leading that transformation. We're pioneering AI driven design capabilities in our products, that deliver orders of magnitude productivity gains for our customers and pave the way for agent engineers with increasing levels of autonomy. One highlight among many this quarter was receiving World Economic Forum honors for our work with AMD to advance AI accelerated chip design. AI isn't disrupting our business. it's amplifying our strategic advantage. Another market trend and tailwind for Synopsys is the engineering transformation away from physical testing towards digital twins. To build more …
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