We would like to draw your attention to the screen for the safe harbor statement and today's agenda.
Every foundational technology eventually reaches a physical limit. We have reached it. AI, electrification, automotive, robotics. The future is arriving faster than the systems beneath it can support. The challenge is no longer just more power. It is better power. Faster, cooler, more efficient, more reliable, more dense. Because power density is not a device problem. It is a system problem. Electrical, thermal, mechanical, physical, all working together all at once. That is why it matters.
ON Semiconductor has been building the capabilities required to solve power density ahead of the curve. From silicon carbide and GaN to sensing and across intelligent systems, from grid to core, from vehicle to robot, from factory floor to physical AI, onsemi turns complexity into capability.
In AI data centers, power is not just a resource. It is the limit to performance, capacity, and enabling intelligence. ON Semiconductor integrates power technologies across the system to reduce loss, manage heat, improve efficiencies, and unlock more compute where it counts.
In automotive, intelligence has to move through the entire architecture. ON Semiconductor's intelligent power enables longer range, better efficiency, and improves safety and system value. Designed together, not added later. In industrial, the cost of inefficiency compounds. Miss the signal and lose uptime, add complexity and burn margin. ON Semiconductor integrates intelligent power and sensing with machine vision technologies across the system to help factories move faster, see more clearly, and operate more efficiently.
The systems that win can sense, convert, deliver, protect, and optimize energy in real time. Power density is not solved by a single device. It requires electrical, thermal, mechanical, and physical challenges to be solved together. ON Semiconductor turns those constraints into opportunity by combining these technologies at a system level, enabling efficiency, reliability, density, and scale.
The next era will not be defined by compute alone. It will be defined by power density. ON Semiconductor is built to break the constraint. Without intelligence built into the system, limits don't disappear. They multiply. Higher losses, slower scale, more complexity, less value. But when power, sensing, and control are designed to work together, the system becomes the advantage.
The future is not being limited by ambition. It is being limited by the physical systems beneath it. The next era will be defined by companies that can transform energy into efficiency, signals into insight, and complexity into competitive advantage. That is where ON Semiconductor is built to lead.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage president and CEO of ON Semiconductor, Mr. Hassane El-Khoury.
It is the era of AI, but just like any foundational technology, it's hitting already a physical limitation. Because foundational technology, it's not an invention. It's really not a product. It is a layer upon which all industries after it are going to be built. And the problem we have is we've reached that limit. The good thing though, companies are using technology to break through that limit. You're going to see a new ON Semiconductor that is foundationally different in order to break through those limitations and through that breakthrough create the opportunity that we will also be talking about today because it is not unexpected.
Reaching this physical limitation has always happened throughout our civilization, that the further you go with the capabilities of that layer, the faster those limitations start to occur. We've seen it all the way back to the first foundational technology as simple as what we consider now the steam engine. It really didn't unlock that capability until we figured out how to do machining to make those cylinders. The computing didn't really unlock the capability of that foundational technology till decades later with the transistor design. And today, with the era of AI, those technologies are compute, memory, and power. And those are the breakthroughs that we have to have in order to really unlock AI into the potential that it is meant to be.
And we've seen those limitations. We've seen the first limitation with compute. We've lived through it and we've unlocked it with advancements in technology and capacity. And we've also seen it with memory. We're actually, I would argue, we're living through it with memory with advancements that are going to break through. But neither of these are at the physical layer where power sits. And that is the breakthrough that we have to unlock in order for the deployment to not just be contained to a building but really proliferate into the foundational technology that AI is going to enable across all of our end markets.
Because more power is really not enough. We need better power, and we need different power than yesterday where loads were deterministic. It was okay not to be efficient. We had enough of it because the loads were not as intense. But that challenge has changed where power is always at a max. It's always on, always at peak, and it has to be perfect and it has to be distributed, not only centralized. And that is where we come in. We solve power. We solve the power of yesterday and we are going to solve the power of tomorrow, which is the power density equation that we're going to be talking about.
Because as we look at what systems are requiring, all requirements are going in opposite directions and they're not converging. Customers want higher voltage inputs, lower voltage outputs, smaller areas, cooler areas, and of course cost is always a challenge in order to bring deployment. And these requirements pull the solutions further apart. And it's getting worse. It's getting harder.
We all know whether it's data center, automotive going from 400 to 800 and above, automotive already broken through the 800 into 900 volts. The grid needs to upgrade. And if any of you cover or invest in grid, you know how quick that happens. And that's going to be pushing that boundary and pulling those requirements for what a capable solution needs to cover. And for that you need a different approach. It is no longer an approach of just technology. We have to change the solution that we provide. And because of that, we had to become a different company in order to deliver on that power density to unlock the value that the new era brings.
But we've built that company on a strong foundation of technologies that we have had. And over the last six years, we have continued through investments, through capital deployment, and through accelerating what is possible into the company we become today with a very broad set of capabilities that have delivered the ON Semiconductor portfolio of power, sense, and control across all of our end markets.
And we will continue expanding those capabilities and that portfolio with the connected compute as we've announced already, because for every investment and every breakthrough we've had has been very deterministic ahead of an inflection point, whether it was automotive with electrification, the first wave of upgrades of energy infrastructure, all the way into the future of what we expect the physical AI to be, which is starting to happen today around us in industrial with robotics, and I would argue already in automotive with the autonomous vehicle and autonomous driving. And that capability and that company we have built is here to address a growing market across all of these secular growth from automotive to AI data center and industrial and the AI overlay on top of it driving that growth and that content starting with the AI halo in industrial all the way to an over $200 billion market that we are addressing with the innovative solutions that you'll hear about today.
But more importantly, all of these markets, no matter what drivers are driving them from a content perspective, are converging on one clear outcome, which is more than half is centered around power and is centered on better power. But to solve the power, it is not a new product. It is not a new technology. It is not a new system. It is a layering effect of a value stack that has to work across top to bottom to deliver on that power density with the efficiency that is required to scale. Starting with a foundation of technology into a deployment of products that extract the capabilities of these technologies and together create these solutions that are going to solve these customer problems and deliver the systems with the value and scale that will solve those generational problems.
And with that combination of technologies all the way up and down, systems impacting products, products defining systems, is how we will change the power system paradigm.
And taking those requirements that are pulling apart and creating very focused specific platforms, technologies, and products from devices to the intelligence required to the interface and the integration that is going to unlock the value of these technologies, products, solutions all the way to systems. And that's how we will make those requirements that are historically pulling apart converge into a center solution where onsemi plays and onsemi creates, and that extracts that value from high voltage to the intelligence with Treo to EPP, Embedded Power Platform, which I will introduce today.
Starting with high voltage, our broad portfolio covers all of the constraints, but also all of the solutions and the required technologies that customers look for, from an unconstrained silicon power to optimizing for high voltage, optimizing for efficiency, and optimizing now for density. And we are the only company that is able to optimize across the complete high voltage stack and deliver sustainable and competitive solutions for our customers to solve the most complex power density problems.
And the latest high voltage introduction and breakthrough in a series of breakthrough in high voltage is on the vertical GaN, which we have been able to develop, sample, and manufacture, and already put in the hands of customers on their boards to solve from automotive to industrial and AI data centers.
And the intelligence comes from our Treo platform. Again, talking about platform as a foundation to any product that goes on top of it with the innovation that is required across voltages and across deployment, with a module architecture that allows us to very quickly introduce the solutions that are required across all of our end markets, across all of the applications and the secular growth that we have seen.
But on top of high voltage and the intelligence, we cannot forget the integration, because all of the benefit of technology is lost if we are not able to extract what that potential would be.
The next era of innovation will be defined by how efficiently we deliver power. Artificial intelligence, electrified transportation, industrial automation, and energy infrastructure are all demanding more power in less space. With greater efficiency and reliability, the real challenge is power density. Solving that challenge requires a new way to design the power system itself. The solution: Embedded Power Platform, or EP. It is not a product. It is a platform to solve power density.
EP reimagines the package from passive housing into an active contributor to system performance by using the silicon wafer itself as the package. It embeds and interconnects heterogeneous semiconductor products built on silicon, silicon carbide, and gallium nitride in a highly integrated wafer-level architecture. Multiple devices, FETs, drivers, and controllers can be embedded together for optimal electrical, thermal, and mechanical system performance.
EP enables complete power system co-design. Electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties can be evaluated, simulated, and optimized together from the beginning to accelerate system development, reduce late-stage changes, and unlock new levels of power density with a faster go-to-market. EP represents the next revolutionary step in electronics integration and miniaturization. A new foundation for power systems. A new platform for power density and another example of how ON Semiconductor is redefining what is possible.
Redefining what is possible is what we've done. The ability to take high voltage, any technology, take the intelligence with Treo, and embed those products in a wafer, solving not only the density or the mechanical constraint, but at the same time being able to deliver on the thermal benefit that is otherwise wise go the opposite direction, pulling the density and the mechanical constraint apart. And we've delivered it. You'll see it in our demo showroom across all end markets we service. And that technology, we know power and we know packaging because we're leaders in both.
And I'm here to tell you we've solved high power already. We've solved it with surface area. That's how we cool. Other technologies, state-of-the-art technologies, have tried to solve the density problem and they failed with the thermal. EP is the only platform today that not only obsoletes the best-in-class, but delivers on the promise of a true power density that does not use mechanical and thermal as trade-offs for electrical.
And this is not some faraway concept we have. We have been able to deliver within five days or less a customer platform that customers can take and simulate their power domain for their cooling and their thermal concepts. And then quickly using our standard 12-inch manufacturing, a sample electrical, thermal, and mechanical, in this case an inverter, across automotive, across AI data centers, and across the industrial markets.
And puts us in a class of companies that is from technology all the way through delivery in a unique and competitive position where we are able to use the high voltage, the intelligence, all the way to the integration to be uniquely positioned to deliver those solutions to the customer, because as the requirements pull apart, we have been able to make them converge, not with a product, not with a one-off solution, but with a platform spreading across devices, intelligence, and integration with advanced packaging to solve those high-intensity power density problems across all of our end markets.
Good afternoon. Good to see everyone here. I am Arut Sha and I'm the president of ON Semiconductor's power solutions group. I've been at ON Semiconductor just over four months now and I'm very excited with the opportunity we have to continue to help AI scale. I've been part of this AI and data center market for over 10 years. First at Maxim Integrated and more recently at Marvell, and I've seen the tremendous value a company can create when the needs of the AI market converge with the capability that a company has developed, and that is exactly the opportunity we have today in front of us at ON Semiconductor.
Now you all have seen multiple chip companies create value in compute, in connectivity, in memory by solving the bottlenecks of AI to help it scale. But as we look forward, the bottleneck is no longer just in a single chip or a single technology or a single capability. The bottleneck moves to power and more specifically the entire power domain from grid to site to core.
The reason this becomes a challenge is the sheer amount of power required to scale the compute for AI. The processors grow from hundreds of watts to kilowatt. The amount of power in racks needs to go from tens of kilowatts to megawatt. And when you look at this increase in the power at the rack level and multiplied by the number of data centers that need to be built, you now see that there is hundreds of gigawatts of power that need to be developed. And the architecture of old simply cannot deliver that. It simply cannot scale. You need to upgrade the entire architecture for the power tree. And the fundamental challenge, as Goldman Sachs put it very well, is power density. How do you fit the power of a thousand homes in one small cabinet? The enabling factor for the power architecture of the future is going to be power density. And the company that can enable this power density, enable this architecture of the future is going to be the one to capture and generate tremendous value.
Before we look at what this new architecture is and what opportunities it's going to create, let's take a step back. What is power density? What is the value of power density? This power density is fundamentally what's going to help redefine the economics of compute, the economics of AI. Power density is not just taking the amount of power you need and closing it into a smaller space. You also have to do that very efficiently. You also have to take into effect the cooling and the thermals behind that solution. So the space, the efficiency, the cooling, they're all different facets of the same power density challenge.
And if you give your customers a highly power dense solution, a solution that solves this power density problem, they can use it in multiple ways to optimize their systems. They could use the same amount of power in less space. They get to build less data centers, solving a space problem. You can take the same amount of space and deliver a lot more power in that space. Now we have a lot more tokens per unit area, a lot more tokens per dollar, a lot more tokens per capex that you've generated. And all the while you can run all of these solutions at a lower temperature. You can run them cooler. Now you're using less natural resources like water. So not only is power density important to improve the total cost of ownership for our customers, it also helps them use less natural resources like land and water. This is why this is the fundamental challenge, the foundational challenge that needs to be solved to enable the architecture of tomorrow.
If you look at the architecture that we have today where the processors, XPUs, GPUs are hundreds of watts going to a kilowatt, what we see is the power distribution and conversion is primarily AC all the way from the grid to the site and all the way to the compute rack. Within the compute rack, you have a couple of conversions at lower voltage. And finally at the core itself, the point of load, you have what we call lateral power where power is sitting side by side in a larger area. But as the power in these processors grows, it doubles and then doubles again in the following generation, the architecture of old no longer scales. We now need to move to what we call the HVDC, the high voltage DC architecture where DC is transmitted all the way from the grid to the site as close as possible to the compute. You have lower number of conversions directly from high voltage to the compute and the compute power itself, the point of load, instead of sitting next to the GPUs and XPUs, now sits underneath it, again creating a power density challenge.
And the opportunity here is not just everything in this forward power tree, but you also have solutions like fault management, energy storage systems, uninterrupted power supplies, all of them sitting on this low voltage AC system today that all need to be converted to high voltage. Now, as you see the extent of the change that is needed, clearly all of this doesn't happen overnight. You can be doing this in a step function. And it happens in a phased manner over time and different customers will deploy this at different points of time over the next few years.
So if you look at what the major steps are going to be in this transformation, you start looking at the rack of today, you have AC coming into the compute rack, a power supply unit at the top, a few tens of kilowatts using low voltage semiconductors like silicon. The first step as these racks need to now go to 30, 40 kilowatt racks is the power supply unit itself starts using high voltage semiconductors like silicon carbide, increasing the HV content as it can make these AC to next power level conversion a lot more efficiently.
The next big change we see is when high voltage DC, 800 volts, now 1500 volts at some point in the future, comes directly to the power rack. And two things happen here. The distribution of power in the compute rack as the bus bar goes from 54 volts to 800 volts, because as the level of energy goes up, as the level of power goes up, a low voltage bus bar will need so much copper and you will lose so much in energy and heat, it's not feasible anymore. So first you got to upgrade the bus bar to a higher voltage. And with a bus bar at high voltage, the power on the compute trays itself right next to the processor is now high voltage. And the first conversion step on the compute tray goes from low voltage to a high voltage conversion step. This is what we call as a sidecar architecture that's going to be deployed in the next 12 to 18 months.
Now looking out another couple of years, the entire distribution from the grid to the site to the rack goes from AC to high voltage DC. And so now we essentially have a one line of high voltage with new content like solid state transformers going all the way from the grid to the rack with less number of conversions down to the core. And if we take all of this new content that needs to be created at the core and all the high voltage distribution and conversion, and you think about normalizing at a rack level, the amount of content growth it drives for ON Semiconductor goes from about $15,000 a rack to over $115,000, about an 8x increase in content. And this is what's going to drive the revenue growth at ON Semiconductor at a fundamental level.
And when you look at this growth that's created, it actually helps growth in two different end markets for us. Everything that's inside the building of the data center or even when hyperscalers put ESS technologies or SSDs right at the site of the data center, we consider all of that to be part of our AI data center segment of revenue. And as AI continues to scale, this will see tremendous growth over the next few years. But when the utility sites and the power grids also upgrade their infrastructure to go to solid state and use high voltage ESS, that part drives the growth in the industrial part of our business. So we essentially see an AI halo that also helps further drive the growth and increase the growth potential in the industrial portion of our business.
Now when you look at this new architecture end to end, there are two things that become very clear. The first, look at the amount of high voltage content there is across this entire grid to site to core. You have power conversion, power distribution, power storage, UPS, high voltage content all the way to the core with the intelligence and the control that goes with it. Now this high voltage technology is exactly what we have developed, is exactly where we are leaders in the automotive and industrial space. So it's the same technology base, it's the same research, R&D, it's the same platform that we've developed that has made us a leader in industrial and automotive that is now coming into the world of AI that will help make us the leader there too. This is exactly what I meant when I said that the needs of the AI market are moving to our playing field.
The other part that you see here is it's one end-to-end connected system. There's less conversions. It's not AC going to DC going to AC. It's all one high voltage system directly going to the compute rack and to the core. This is why our customers talk about this as one end-to-end interconnected system that needs extreme co-design because any issue, any fault, any transient at one end of the system, you can see how it would directly translate and move to the other end of the system uniformly. So only companies that have the capabilities to serve every single piece of this power tree can help our customers design these end-to-end systems.
And when you look at it for all the capabilities required, all the technologies required, all the investment required for intelligence, for control, for high voltage, multiple high voltage technologies, low voltage technologies, core and control, how many companies actually have the scale and the capability to be able to invest and to be able to design leading-edge solutions across this entire power tree? If you look on the low voltage side, on the core side, this is where you have the most number of competitors. Now there's 10-15 competitors with press releases out there talking about having a core solution. But when you talk to our customers, there's probably five or six that actually have the technology, the engineering ability, and the scale to be able to deliver these solutions to them in the manner that they require.
Now, when you build onto that what's needed in the middle part of this power tree, the high voltage requirements of silicon carbide, of GaN, you can see that the competitor list shrinks considerably. Now there's just a handful, three or four competitors that have the ability and the scale to be able to deliver these solutions. When you now look at the grid side with further high voltage and energy storage solutions, and now you need fault management all the way across from the core all the way to the grid using technologies like silicon carbide JFETs, you're really left with just two companies, ON Semiconductor and one more, that have the capability to participate across this entire power tree from grid to core.
This breadth of technology is no longer a nice-to-have. This is a must-have to participate and compete in this market. And at ON Semiconductor, we're not just in this to participate. We are in this to actually win at every single point in this power architecture. And the way you do that, the way you win, is you have the breadth of technologies, you have the best-in-class technologies at every point in the breadth. But then you also deliver breakthrough innovations for our customers to solve the fundamental challenges they have to enable AI to scale, the fundamental challenge of power density. And Hassane shared with you a couple of these innovations that we've made: high voltage GaN, vertical GaN, and EP.
Vertical GaN has the unique characteristics of high voltage as well as high frequency switching with very high efficiency. And EP is not a product. It's a platform that applies for a solution at every single point in this power architecture, helping improve the power density that our customers want. And I want to walk you through a few examples of where we are working very closely and have already delivered some of these solutions in the hands of our customer.
Let's first start with the high voltage conversion. The 800-volt to 6-volt or 12-volt conversion right at the rack in the compute rack. Using our unique VGAN technologies and using the magnetics expertise we have, we've created our own system that provides 20% better efficiency, 20% lower size than the nearest competitors that we have. And if you think of providing 20% lower size in the compute rack, in the most precious real estate in the data center, you're essentially allowing more compute per rack and a lot lower cost per token or a lot more tokens that our customers can deliver per hour from that investment that they've already made.
Another place that we help using our unique technology is on the circuit breaker side, because as you look at this entire high voltage system, fault protection and safety becomes an absolute requirement going forward. So the mechanical systems and circuit breakers of yesterday no longer scale. You now need to move this fundamental solution into a solid state technology with the introduction of the solid state circuit breaker. But you don't just have one circuit breaker in the system. You have multiple solid state circuit breakers at multiple points in the system which uses precious real estate, which is why power density again is the fundamental problem to solve, the fundamental challenge to solve, to enable this new high voltage DC architecture.
And so what ON Semiconductor has done, using our leading silicon carbide JFETs and embedding them in this EP platform, we have come out with a solution that for the same functionality is 50% smaller than our nearest competitor. Now when you make a solution that small, the logical question to ask is, yeah, but what happens about the thermals? How hot is that thing going to run? So, not only have we solved the space problem using the unique characteristics of EP, we have also made the solution which is 50% smaller, we made it run 20% cooler. Now, if you have a solution that's 50% smaller and 20% cooler, if that's not a breakthrough, I don't know what is. With a combination of both of these capabilities, we fundamentally deliver significantly better total cost of ownership for our end customers.
The last example that I would like to walk through is the VCore. Now, this is a place that we came a little later to the market, but we have solutions that have caught up and we have a best-in-class power density solution that our customers are using today with the lateral VCore. But as you look forward, where we are investing and going forward is taking the EP technology and using it to provide the best-in-class type of the next generation VCore solution as it goes into vertical power.
So you take the XPUs, embed it within the EP solution and now within the same XY dimensions that the customers want, we now have a much thinner solution than our competitors and the cooling runs a lot better. You have a lot better air flow across the XPUs, the GPUs, and the TPUs providing significant benefit to our customers. And this is not, and VCore is not something that we will only win in the future with the EP-based vertical power solution. In fact, I'm very happy to announce that we won a major VCore socket this year with revenue starting by the end of 2026 already in this market.
So when you look at the fundamental shift from low voltage to high voltage architecture, the fundamental problem that needs to be solved with power density, and this technology breadth of technology capability with innovation breakthroughs that ON Semiconductor has delivered to help solve the power density problem, our goal is to deliver better TCO to the customers and that will fundamentally drive higher revenue and higher margin for ON Semiconductor going forward.
The question is how high is this revenue growth going to be? When we look at the growth estimates that the analysts put out, some of you are here. It varies across from a 20% range to an 80% range. We have a wide variation of what this is. But one thing we are very confident in is the technologies that we've talked about, the technological breakthroughs that we are providing today are going to enable us to significantly outgrow the market. And you're already seeing this in the near term. In 2026, we're going to more than double the AI data center part of our business. And we have visibility into 2027 where this business is going to double again.
So our expectation is for the long term through 2030, we are going to grow at least 10% above the market. We are going to take market share and grow at least 10% above whatever market estimate is out there. So if you take an example, if you create a baseline to say the market's going to grow somewhere in the middle, say at 40% CAGR, then we will grow our revenue on the AI data center segment at at least 50%. And what that means is from a $500 million base in '26, we will deliver over $2.5 billion of revenue just in 2030.
AI has, the scaling of AI where power has become a fundamental problem, has turned this entire power architecture, the high voltage architecture, into an end-to-end connected system. It takes a breadth of capabilities and leading-edge capabilities to play in this. And as you've seen, the price and the market continues to grow and the size of the competitive field continues to shrink and we are focused on delivering revenue and margin and value to our shareholders by solving the toughest challenges in this AI market. Thank you.
Okay, on to the markets that I know you really came to hear about. Automotive and industrial. I'm Sudir Gopal Swami and I'm going to spend about 20 minutes talking about our strategy to grow in automotive and industrial, which together represent the core of our business. And I'll start with automotive.
There, we've been very public about our intent to grow at high single digits above SAR, and I'm happy to say that in fact we've done just that. We've grown by 9% in an environment where SAR has been flat between 2019 and 2026. And the way that we've done that is by executing the recipe that Hassane outlined at the start of the presentation: recognize the mega trend, build a value stack of capability, and deliver products that generate business growth.
And of course, the two mega trends that have driven the automotive space, no pun intended, have been the evolution of electrification and electrified vehicles and the evolution of autonomy and autonomous vehicles. In each of these areas, we have actually built these value stacks that have fueled our growth. And the center of those stacks have been silicon carbide and CMOS image sensing respectively for electrification and for autonomous. But around that center we've built an array of ICs that contribute to our growth.
And our plan going forward is essentially to do the same thing, to outgrow SAR by 9%. We forecast that between '26 and 2030 SAR will continue to be flat while we'll grow our automotive revenue at about 9% a year. And so two things are different about the next phase of our plan relative to where we've come from. The first is that we benefit from a third mega trend. So electrification and autonomous will continue to provide tailwinds for us.
In electrification, there'll be a continued penetration of EVs across fleets. So going from 25% of all vehicles today to about 40% of all vehicles by 2030. And in autonomous, there's an evolution to the levels of autonomy from L2 today to L2 plus, which yields a lot of benefits and creates a lot of value to semiconductor companies, and to L3 and L4. But in addition to these two mega trends, we benefit from a third one, and that's the transition to software-defined vehicles that are executed based on a zonal systems architecture. So that third mega trend is a difference going forward.
The other big difference is our strategy going forward is not just to outgrow the SAR, we will do that, but also shift to value. And so I'll describe an array of products that deliver more value to our customers. And we intend to share that value that we create with our customers. Now we'll walk through step by step how we're going to grow this business, starting with electrification. And here the focus of our product portfolio is intelligent power. And there's a three-phase or element strategy to grow here, and they're consistent with the
layers of the value stack. So at the foundation, we're going to continue to extend the leadership that we have in silicon carbide technology. At the next level up, we're going to introduce and proliferate a broad array of products based on the trail platform that create more value at the system level. And then at the upper layer at that system layer we're going to bring EP into electrified vehicles in the form of traction inverters. Let me talk about each of those.
Starting with silicon carbide. So over the past several years we have grown the or increased the performance of our silicon carbide technology by about 20 to 25% a generation. And this has unleashed tremendous system level value. Now going forward, we intend to do the same. Increase by 25% or even more by generation. And we're going to announce in about two months the next generation which has device structure changes that is going to deliver that type of performance improvement.
And so when you deliver this performance improvement in silicon carbide, essentially what you're doing is you're reducing power losses, whether they're conducting losses or switching losses. And when you reduce those power losses, you have kind of a twofur in terms of benefits that you create. One, you improve efficiency, so you get more useful or usable power out. The second and one that's becoming increasingly important is that you get more power density.
So now customers can benefit from these efficiency and power density gains in multiple ways. You guys already understand that efficiency can translate into either extended range or reduced system cost because the thermal solution becomes much more efficient and you need less battery. So you avail of those options as a customer. Now power density is an interesting one. So if you think about power density, you're either packing more power into a given area or volume and when you do that you're able to deliver for example more horsepower or you can pack the same amount of power into a smaller volume and when you do that you're getting the benefits of actually reducing system cost. So you again have a layer of benefit that as a customer you can choose from with these performance increases in silicon carbide.
Now in addition to these performance gains, we're also extending the voltage of our silicon carbide devices. And the intent here is to enable a better experience with respect to charging, faster charging times. Doing that requires that we actually scale our voltage over time up to 1,400 volts. And when we do that, we address solutions with 1,000 volt batteries. Now, we're already beginning to do this and some of the leadership that we have created for ourselves in the China market is tied to their movement to higher voltage batteries where they're already at 900 volt batteries. This will continue over time in China and it will scale across the world. Okay. The foundation is silicon carbide. All of these innovations raise the bar and distance us from the rest of the field.
The next level up is then to introduce a wide variety of ICs and these ICs as I said are based on the trail platform and they range in complexity but all of them solve very specific system problems. So we have power protection devices and low dropout voltage regulator devices that scale across the power tree and help our customers implement those full power tree solutions. And the power tree starts at the source which is either the high voltage EV battery or a 12 volt going to 48 volt lower voltage battery and it culminates in the nodes or the devices that ultimately consume the power.
We're also introducing intelligent current controllers for traction and I'll talk more about that in a minute. And then LED drivers that are actually responsible for delivering power to the LED lights and that are increasingly adopted in systems. And then finally that same vcore capability the controllers coupled with the smart power stages that was talking about in data center also applies to power the brain, the central computer in vehicles. So a range of products. Let's talk a little bit more specifically about one of those which is the intelligent current controller.
So for that let's just get a little context. If you look inside a traction inverter and remember its job in life is relatively straightforward. Take power from a battery and deliver it to a motor. At the core of that at the center of that you need high voltage FETs like the type Hassan described. And today the most prevalent one is silicon carbide. So silicon carbide again benefiting from those sequential performance improvements is the essence of a traction inverter and it's coupled with a gate driver and as the name implies that gate driver just drives the silicon carbide and you switch it as fast as you possibly can and that's how you generate power. In addition there are a number of other system components and you see some of them outlined here. This is the industry standard inverter.
Now what we're doing is introducing new capabilities in the silicon carbide FET. We call that sensefet capability and new capabilities in our new class of product in the gate driver family which we call the intelligent sic current controller. And the simplified view of what these things do is they work very tightly together to deliver superior performance. The idea is simple that if I can sense the FET current and other characteristics that determine reliability like for example temperature and I can respond very quickly then I can actually drive that FET to a higher performance than I would otherwise be able to do and when we do this together we will deliver a one generation improvement in performance in essence for free. So take any silicon carbide generation and you get a one generation performance boost and you already know how OEMs will be able to utilize that.
And also because we're integrating some of the components on the BOM, we're able to reduce the system costs for our customers. And so this is something that we are sampling this month and we've already pre-engaged with a variety of different customers on the solution that combines these two elements and customers are genuinely excited about this. Okay, silicon carbide foundation, these ICs that create value like the silicon carbide intelligent current controller and then at the highest level it's bringing EP to traction inverters.
And so you see here an idea of the size of EP for traction inverters, but it's probably a little bit more helpful for me to show you. So this is something called a power box. It's the essence of the traction inverter. And inside it, you can see these three modules. And those three modules carry the silicon carbide FETs. And it's coupled with this cooling solution here. And again, this is essentially what a traction inverter is. You couple with electronics, something called a DC link capacitor, and you have a traction inverter. So, this is the existing state-of-the-art. We're delivering solutions at this level of complexity.
And now, this is the same capability, but now leveraging EP. So, with EP, you get a dramatic increase in volume. So, 2x what we're talking about here. And at the same time, because it's smaller and because of the innovation that we're creating, you get a 2x increase in power. So 2x increase in power in half the area gives you 4x the power density. And when you get a 4x in power density, it obviously delivers you the benefits that I described a moment ago, but I think much more importantly, it creates design flexibility. So, Inuan at Subaru in this video explained that that's a value proposition.
By reducing area, you're reducing the consumption of a very precious commodity, space in vehicles. And you also can do very creative things. So now I can consider putting this traction inverter in, for example, each of the four wheels of my car. And when I do that, I can deliver call it a megawatt of power in each of those four wheels. So for high performance vehicles, this is a breakthrough. That's an example of one of the things you do design flexibility.
Another thing is the same module, the same system, power system by simply populating or depopulating parts allows you to scale as an OEM from the low end of your fleet in terms of power all the way up to the high end of your fleet. Single platform low-end to high-end that means you spend less R&D resources to test these things and you spend less in manufacturing because you have a single platform. This is another extreme value add for OEM customers and in addition because it's smaller you get all of the benefits associated with efficiency. So, this is a real breakthrough and customers like Subaru and other high-performance vehicle manufacturers are truly excited about getting started with EP.
Okay, so that's the growth plan for power. Let's transition now to sensing. In sensing, there are again three elements of the plan. The first one is to take advantage of the natural evolution that is going to drive more sensor content. And the second is that we're going to improve that sensor technology fundamentally and increase or create value by doing that. And then finally, we're going to tackle some of the biggest problems in perception by extending vision.
So let's start with the sensor portfolio that we have. You guys are very familiar with our CMOS image sensing. We're leaders from a technology perspective in that space. You may be less familiar with the fact that we are number one in ultrasonic sensing. And ultrasonic sensors are used primarily in park assist today to help you park the car. And as well number one in inductive sensing. And inductive sensing is used to measure the position, for example, the position of a steering wheel or the accelerator and brake pedal, which you do in X by wire or drive by wire type of applications. So, you're replacing mechanical components with electrical ones, improving reliability by using these type of inductive position sensors. So, that's the broad portfolio that we have today.
And as I said, there's a natural increase in content that's just happening as autonomy scales. If you think about that in the context of cameras, I think it's readily apparent that as you scale from L2 to L4, you need more. And we size that at about a factor of three. And even in ultrasonic and inductive sensing, we're going to see a proliferation. But here, the proliferation is going to be driven by more use cases. So, one example for ultrasonic is that you can combine it with image sensing to actually clean lenses. And you'll see a demo of that downstairs. Many demos you'll see that really bring to life all of the benefits that I'm talking about.
And so new applications will drive more ultrasonic content. And similarly, as you have more X by wire applications, so will you have more inductive sensors. As I said, not just that, but we're actually improving the performance and the capability of these sensors. In image sensors, one of the big deals right now is to drive higher levels of system integration. And the biggest opportunity to do that is to take the SerDes that connects it to other ECUs like for example the ADAS system or the IVI system that exists in cars and integrate that into the sensor ASIC. So we're doing that and that presents BOM savings and system cost savings for our customers. Meanwhile, in ultrasonic and inductive sensing, the focus is on improving position precision.
So in fact, in each of these cases, we're improving precision or accuracy by a factor of 20. So in ultrasonic, what this means is now you can detect position of obstacles within 1 cm. And you can see how that improves the safety of, for example, a parking experience. Inductive sensing gets that same 20x improvement in resolving the position and the control of the things that I'm trying to control. So steering wheel or brake pedal and accelerator pedal, all of those translate into improved vehicle safety.
So all of these sort of raise the bar on sensing. And then finally, we're going to try to tackle some of the most pernicious problems in perception. So if you look at all of the technologies that comprise the perception stack today, vision is really good at resolution, but it suffers from bad weather conditions. Radar is really good at measuring velocity and does well in bad weather conditions, but very difficult for radar to resolve where something is and what that something is. And LiDAR has some benefit, but also suffers in poor weather conditions and also has an exorbitantly high system cost. So, how do you improve perception in light of these challenges? Well, one solution is just throw more at the problem. Throw more sensors. In one sense, that's good, but we don't think that's the most effective approach. Instead, ours is to extend vision.
And what we're trying to do is take advantage of that core capability that we have in sensing technology, in image sensing technology, and augment it to solve perception problems. One example is using indirect time of flight through which you measure the phase shift when you project light and it's reflected back. And when you do that, you can identify depth of objects and in doing that better understand why those objects impede progress while you're driving the vehicle. And we're working with customers on building that capability right now.
And potentially even more exciting is to take our shortwave IR technology which today finds applications in industrial and military or aerospace defense and security type of applications and bring that into vehicles. Now we're in the advanced technology stage here. But when that works, what we'll be able to do is see through inclement weather conditions like fog and rain. And so in aggregate all of this essentially extends vision and creates what we call superhuman vision addressing those fundamental perception problems that exist in the industry today.
So power and sensing and then now moving to the third growth driver for us and for the industry overall which is the evolution to software-defined vehicles based on a zonal systems architecture. So the industry is aligned on the first two pictures shown up above. The move from this domain controller-based architecture with a hodgepodge of controllers and a wide array of connectivity technologies kind of spaghetti through the vehicle to a zonal architecture where you have an Ethernet backbone and that backbone now extends into the zones using a technology called 10BASE-T1S or single pair Ethernet. So you have Ethernet end to end and you have the electronics aggregated into clusters for zones. So you have a zonal controller for for example the top, the front left, the front right and then similarly for the back.
So the industry is moving to this and our participation is to provide the 10BASE-T1S technology that exists in the zones. Now what we're doing is changing the game by introducing a capability called remote control protocol and that's reflected in the image on the right. And when we do that what we're doing is simplifying the entire network. You see in the first step there's still a complexity with respect to software. But with remote control protocol what we're doing is enabling that brain, that central computer to talk directly to the node, remotely control that node. And when you do that, you eliminate layers of software complexity and also layers of MCU that exist through that network. Makes the network very simple to deploy and software defined vehicles more easy to realize.
And as we do that, we participate today as I said with the 10BASE-T1S is today manifest as MAC 5 products. And we couple those in the cases where we have the node sensor or actuator like for example ultrasonic sensing or an LED actuator. So our content is the combination of those two discrete products. Now as we move to RCP what you'll see here is we're subsuming MCU and software functionality. So our solution becomes richer and saves the OEM in complexity and in cost. And in doing that, we double the opportunity that we have per vehicle. And then as we move forward, our intent is actually to create these intelligent node SoCs leveraging that trail platform. So combining the node actuator or sensor with the RCP software and 10BASE-T1S. And when you do that, you create even more value, 3x of what we could get today with simply the MAC 5 and the node device.
So you can see how this contributes to growth. Now, if we bring all of these together, we create an opportunity that scales up to $2,000 per vehicle across all of these electrification, ADAS, and now zonal systems architecture up to $2,000 of onsemi content per vehicle.
And this is great in and of itself, but also every innovation that we take advantage of in automotive, silicon carbide, zonal architecture, the various sensing technologies not only drives growth in automotive but extends our potential to grow into the industrial area. You see, each of these technologies doesn't just apply to automotive, it also finds application in industrial. You see that today with silicon carbide in energy infrastructure or image sensing and cameras. Those are apparent. But just like that, 10BASE-T1S and ultrasonic and inductive sensors make their way into industrial applications and collectively they lead us to the era of physical AI.
You see all the innovations that we talked about fit within the pillars of physical AI that Hassan talked about. He described power, sense, and control. And everything that we've talked about fits within each of those pillars, and they pave the way for the era of physical AI. And that era has already begun. If you look at the array of systems that sense, decide, act, and adapt, it's already pretty broad. It ranges from robot vacuums that you might have in your homes to cobots and autonomous mobile robots and drones and all the way up to autonomous vehicles which are the prototypical example of physical AI and we don't count that in the numbers that's captured in automotive but it is an example of physical AI.
And so you see here these systems can be organized in terms of the level of autonomy they have and the level of power that they consume and so the performance that they can deliver and for us the opportunity increases as you go up in autonomy and to the right in terms of more power and performance. And all of these systems they don't just sit still. Those systems are evolving as well.
For example, the warehouse AMRs that exist today are getting legs and through that creating more value. Or factory arms are getting grippers, dexterous hands that allow them more precision in a factory environment. And even autonomous cars are getting smarter in the ability to reason. So as these systems evolve on this path to humanoids that everybody's super excited about, they create opportunities for content and growth for us.
Ultimately, as we get to humanoids by 2030, that becomes a factor as well, and it contributes. But in aggregate the physical AI again excluding automotive represents a $6 billion TAM for us by 2030. And similarly the content that we can offer in humanoids building on the capability that we have in automotive looks very simple here. We can scale to about $900 of content in the various subsystems of the humanoid.
Okay. So, let's bring it all together. In automotive, we're going to grow by 9% a year by creating the system play with EP, by proliferating content in sensors and expanding through that growth, and by creating a new growth engine with zonal architecture. Industrial, we're going to leverage automotive into industrial applications. And then as I talked about, we're going to create a new growth in this AI halo, the industrial side that benefits from the proliferation of AI and as well evolve to physical AI. So those things in aggregate will allow us to grow by 10% in the industrial market. So the core of the business expands at 9 and 10% respectively.
As we do that, we're going to obviously in the products that I talked about, we're going to expand the value that we create and when we do that, we share it with our customers and as a result, our margins expand.
Great to see everyone. Thanks for joining us today. For those of you that maybe I don't know, I'm Thad Trent, CFO. Again, thanks for joining. We're going to wrap this up. The guys have done a great job of talking about the mega trends in the markets that we're focused on and the capabilities. So, I'm going to take you through what this means for our financial model and how we create value for our shareholders as we deliver on these promises.
Now, I'm going to spend a few minutes kind of taking you behind the scenes, showing you what we've been working on for the last five or six years that maybe you haven't seen from the outside. And I think it'll get you some context of how we're set up for growth in this next leg of the company.
So the first thing we have to do is we have to calibrate on what's happened, right? So if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years ago, company highly volatile, unpredictable, did well in good markets, not so well in poor markets. So through the cycle, you can see the gross margin and the operating margins at that time.
We haven't been standing still. Again, we've gone through an up market, we've gone through a down market, and we're coming out of it. As you all know, we haven't been standing still. We've been investing heavily during this time. We've been making changes, structural changes of the company to set us up for this next leg of growth, and we're starting to see the early signs of this now. So, what you can see here on this chart is that the gross margins are higher in this cycle, and the operating margins are higher than what they've been historically.
So big structural improvements. We've been working on our fab right. I'll show you more on that. Investing in differentiated products. We've also exited $900 million of non-core business. And the exits are now done and behind us. So we're completely done as of Q2.
We are driving the operating leverage. And again, I'll show you more at this, but we're seeing the signs already as we're seeing the revenue growth, utilization coming up. We're seeing the leverage in our model start to fall through and so we're seeing a much more resilient model. So we've had this step function and now we're ready for the next step function given the resilience that we've built into our model of what we've been doing.
And if you take that and you look at cash flow, the cash flow margin is significantly different. And this is really a transition of moving from a manufacturing company into a product company. Okay, we've made big investments that we're now ready to leverage and again you'll see a step function improvement in our free cash flow as well. We've been making brownfield investments as well. So I would say in a capex light environment that we've been driving. So I think this sets us up for good growth.
Now the other thing that you haven't had great clarity on the outside is the investments. So we made $8.7 billion of investments over the last five years and I'm going to walk you through where those investments were. So the first thing is R&D.
So $3.6 billion of R&D. The guys have talked about the capabilities. Traction, low, medium, and high voltage. The EP that we're introducing today. Our sensing platform, talked about that one. And then we've been investing in our core portfolio as well. So if you follow the money on the ribbon, you can see that we're leveraging these investments across all of our end markets. So I think this is another advantage of our model that we can create products and actually deploy them into multiple end markets as these markets mature.
The other thing that we've been doing is some M&A. So we've done five tuck-in M&As, $800 million. You can see them there. Various markets there. Follow the money. You can see what we've been investing in. These are all in production or ramping very quickly. We've talked a lot about vertical GaN. Hassan talked about the plans for vertical GaN there. And then capex, $4.3 billion of capex. We brought on our 300 millimeter fab with EFK. We've tuned that cost structure up now. We've invested in our franchise in silicon carbide. We've been investing in vertical GaN. We have a fab in Syracuse now. And then we're in maintenance mode on a lot of this. So you can see where the markets go there as well.
So if you take that and you roll it all out, you can see we've been investing ahead of the curve, right? We're going to where the puck is going. We're skating to where the puck is going, right? So we've seen these mega trends. We're investing in advance and now it's time for us to monetize those investments. So as a result of these, we see significant TAM expansion.
So you can see $20 billion in auto, $16 billion in industrial, and the big one, AI data center, $45 billion TAM expansion there as well. So we've invested $8.7 billion for an $81 billion TAM expansion. Focused on the right markets, seeing them ahead of time, having the right products, that's critical for where we're going. So how do you monetize that? Now you have to have the customers. So if you look at our customer base, we're engaged with all the winners. We're enabling them. We're working strategically with those customers. We create those products. Then we deploy them broadly. We have 9,000 customers around the globe. We have a large distribution network. We're solving very complex problems with our customers. The engagements are very strategic. The guys talked about a lot of it. You heard from some of our customers and how they're engaging with us. They're not buying products. They're buying solutions and systems from us.
Okay. We also don't have customer concentration. No 10% customer and our top 20 customers are 35% of revenue. So broad network, we've been investing in the mass market through distribution as well. That's paying off. We've talked about that in our earnings call that we're starting to see growth in that market as well.
So if I take the markets now, the guys did a good job of explaining it and I start talking about okay, let's sum it all up for the company. So our other market, this is where we play opportunistically. We don't make big investments here, but when we make an investment, if we can leverage in this market at favorable margins, we'll play there all day long. So, we expect that growth over this 2026 to 2030 time frame to be at about a 1% growth. And by the way, this 26 number, everything I'm going to show you is based on street consensus. It's not our estimates. It's actually your estimates. So, we're using your numbers as a baseline.
On the AI data center, Mutt talked about this 50% plus 5x revenue growth when it comes to AI data center. If the market grows at the high end of that range, we're going to outgrow that by 10%. So if there's upside there, you'll see upside to this number as well.
On the industrial side, we're going to grow at 10%. About 40% of our industrial revenue is broad-based kind of traditional. We expect it's going to grow about GDP plus. That's historically what it's done for us. The other 60% is secular and it'll be growing at double digits. So in there is also the AI halo. We've got other markets there that we're playing. You got physical AI that Sudir talked about that'll start to kick in as well. So we think there's about a 10% growth when it comes to industrial.
Automotive. We're going to outgrow SAR. We've got $2,000 of content per car. If SAR we're assuming a flat SAR during this time frame. If SAR actually grows, you will see this number grow as well. So there's upside to that number as well if the market grows faster than what we're projecting here. So when you sum that all up, you get to about a 12 to 14% growth rate for the company. This is higher than what we've been historically. Like I said, there's upside to that as well. If you do the math on that, again, using the 2026 consensus numbers, you get to just under 11 billion of revenue in 2030.
So how do we scale? How do we support this growth? If you go back to what we've been working on over these last few years and again behind the scenes a little bit more, we talked about where we started this in 2019. We started with Fab Right. We had a bunch of subscale fabs. They were really from a bunch of acquisitions that hadn't been integrated well. And so we've exited and divested five fabs, one backend that we've announced as well. And so what we're doing now and where we sit today is we actually have a really clean network that's working well together. So we went through Fab Right. We're continuing to take cost out, but now we've got a network that we can actually scale effectively.
So again, brought in the 300 millimeter fab cost advantage to that. You can see Syracuse, that's for our vertical GaN, and we've got external. So we're still projecting that we'll be manufacturing about 65% externally even in this model as we go forward. So the key point here is it's right sized and it's built to scale. We're ready. So and it's not a big capital investment here. So there won't be additional brownfield investment during this time horizon. We can do this at about a 5% capital intensity. That's where we've been running the last few years what we've been talking about. So we can actually expand within this footprint and scale the business to that 11 billion number without having to add significant investment in capacity.
Also if you look at the current footprint versus the previous footprint and you go back over time look at them both fully utilized you kind of put them apples to apples the current cost structure is 17% lower than it was historically. So that shows the fab right initiatives that we're driving and we're continuing to drive are taking cost out. So it's not just about reducing the number of fabs, it's actually tuning up those fabs to be more efficient and to take cost out.
So we've got more to do there. So how does that impact margin? So first it's scalable, it's efficient, it's lower cost. So when you go to margin, you'll see here our target remains 53%. That's what we've had for a while here. We're not raising that target. But if you listen to everything that Sudir and Hassan talked about, those are all products that are favorable to this target. The 53% is a milestone. It's not a destination. So we're going to hit the 53 and then we'll talk about going higher at some point in the future.
So if you walk through the pieces, you've got utilization 650 basis points. This is just the absorption cost that we have. So as we continue to ramp our utilization that will improve. We've taken our utilization up significantly this year. Exited last year at 68% we're roughly around 83% in Q2 exiting Q2. So you've already seen us taking it up given what we're seeing in the market.
On the fab right 225 basis points. Now this is a little bit different than what we've talked about in the past. It's a little higher, but this also now includes the divestitures that we did previously, the four divestitures. And what we're doing now is we're actually going to move some of that production to the outside to keep capacity for the high value products that the team is talking about internally. So, we'll maximize the margin out of that. So, we'll get about 225 basis points off of that. Now, 50 of that is already in the bag. We've announced the two divestitures. It's now just a matter of time that we'll start to recognize over the next 18 to 24 months as we execute on that.
And then the last piece is the mix and ramping of new products. So these are the products that are favorable to margin. There's also a mix. If you think about the change in what I was telling you on the end markets, there's favorable mix change on that one. And this is the result of us keeping that capacity for that high margin product in there. So that's how you're going to get to 53%.
So we'll do the math here. So structural changes, innovation, execution. This is putting us in a good spot. Talked about the 12 to 14% revenue growth. If you take that 53% gross margin, the gross profit dollars are going to grow by 22%. And the operating margin is going to grow by 30%. So operating margin is going to grow 2x. Operating income is going to grow 2x revenue. So this is the leverage in our model. As we ramp, you'll see more dollars falling through the bottom line.
So if you take that to cash flow and you look at what we've been doing on cash flow, we've been creating strong free cash flow. Right now street consensus is about $1.6 billion in free cash flow for 2026, 25%. If you look at 2025, our free cash flow margin was 24%. That was in a down market. So that's clearly coming through that the company is structurally different and these actions that we have taken are actually coming through.
If you look at the investments that we made, we made our big investments in the capacity that I talked about earlier. So during this 23 and 24 time frame, we invested about $2.2 billion just in capacity. Bringing on East Fishkill, silicon carbide, all the capacity is there for all of this ramp that we've talked about. And that's why we're comfortable with that 5% capital intensity going forward.
So if you model it out, we're looking at free cash flow more than doubling by 2030. More than $3.5 billion. And the free cash flow margin is going to go up. Our target's going to 30 to 35%. It was previously 25 to 30. So again, I think again the leverage in the model. If you look at what we've done between 23 and 26, we bought back $4.2 billion of shares while investing. That's 92% of free cash flow. And we've reduced our share count by 12% during that time.
So the natural question is what are you going to do with that cash? So let's talk about what we're going to do. We're going to continue to do what we've done. We're going to invest in our business, differentiated products, higher ramp, higher growth. We'll continue to invest there.
We'll continue to do M&A to bring in capabilities of the company. Faster time to market if it exists. If we can do it quicker externally than internally, we're happy to do that. So, we're going to continue to invest in our business. So, you saw that on the slide that I showed you earlier. Next piece is balance sheet flexibility. We're in a great spot here on the flexibility. We got plenty of liquidity. We're going to continue to keep that as well. And then after all that, we'll continue to return cash to shareholders. So plan is 100% free cash flow back to shareholders net of everything else. We've got $5.3 billion left on our existing authorization.
So moving to the financial model, summing it all up, what I want to call out to your attention is the 25 and 26 numbers. And again, the 26 number here is street consensus. But if you just compare 25 and 26, this is where you can see the leverage in our model already taking place as the market is starting to recover. So you see gross margins going up, you see operating margins going up and you see our free cash flow improving as well.
So if you look at the 2030 model, I've hit on most of this, but we're looking at 12 to 14%. Previous model was 10 to 12. So we're taking that up primarily driven by the AI data center growth that we didn't see a few years ago. Gross margin milestone 53% we'll talk about more later once we hit the 53. Operating expenses we've been investing through the downturn. You can see where we've been, you know, 18, 19% model is 15%. Now it's slightly higher than what it was previously because we're investing heavily but still an improvement from where we are today. You get to an operating margin of 38% and our capex as I said earlier 5% we can scale this business to 11 billion by only investing 5% of revenue during this time frame and then free cash flow goes 30 to 35% previously it was 25 to 30% so it's a big improvement in the model we think it's compelling there and this is standalone onsemi has nothing to do with Synaptics so if you're curious about what we're going to do with the Synaptics when we close that next year. We think by next year we'll close. But this is the standalone onsemi plan as it sits today as we project today.
So looking at greater than 15% growth. This is higher than where the street currently has Synaptics. We're looking at margins higher than 55%. So accretive to our model. This is differentiated products. You know premium products. We're sure we can improve those margins as well and that gets you to an operating margin greater than 30%. Now there's $200 million of synergies in this number over the first 18 months gets us to accretion and by the way that includes stock-based compensation because we report that in our non-GAAP numbers. If you exclude the stock-based compensation it's accretive coming out of the chute but we account for stock-based comp in non-GAAP. We believe over the long term there's actually more synergies here on the manufacturing side. So we believe there's some opportunities for us to pull some of their products into our manufacturing footprint and actually improve these margins and improve the operating margin. So I believe there's actually over the long term I think there's some upside to the operating margin here as well. But this is standalone.
So just going back to the ON Semi standalone so you can see it again. This is without Synaptics. You guys can do the math on the combined company but we do believe Synaptics is accretive to the overall margin or model.
So as we think about wrapping up here so coming back to the foundation step function improvement if you map the model we're now positioned for another step function improvement in the financial model there as well. So, we're going to accelerate the growth. We're going to continue to work on cost and manufacturing cost. We're going to continue on our Fabright initiatives. There's leverage. And the key point here is that the targeted operating margin is higher than the historical or the legacy gross margins. So I think this clearly shows this company is a different company in position for growth, earnings growth, revenue growth and free cash flow growth.
So as we wrap up, you guys did a great job talking about the markets, the mega trends in each one of these, the AI data center, automotive and industrial. We talk about differentiated capabilities. We have unmatched breadth, advanced platforms. We've been investing in the right products. We have a compelling financial model. And when I think you put it all together, you got expanding markets, you got differentiated capabilities, and you combine that with the discipline that this leadership team has exercised and proven over the last five or six years, you'll get durable and profitable growth. Thank you.
All right. So, we'll open it up to questions. We have a lot of people here, so appreciate it if you could keep your question to one question. And we've got some mic runners here, so just raise your hand and we'll get through all the questions.
Great. Thank you so much, Vive from Bank of America Securities. Thanks for an informative analyst day. Maybe if I could turn that into a clarification and a question if that's okay with you. So the gross margin progression from 40 to 53 is that just kind of a linear progression or did you see kind of different steps along the way? The question really is on the data center business because I think Arut mentioned a doubling into next year. Right so 500 billion right getting to like a billion billion plus but then if we take your 2500 plus by the end of the decade that suggests that growth slows down a lot just at the time when 800 volt is supposed to take up a lot. So is that conservatism? Is it like how do we kind of square this deceleration in growth with when the market trend is just about to take off? Thank you.
Yes. So let me take the first question on the gross margin. So the gross margin look the in the short term the biggest driver of gross margin is utilization. So right so that's going to be market driven. The next biggest piece is really that mix and layering in these other products. Right. We'll continue to execute on our Fabright. I already mentioned that 50 basis points is in the bag. So think about that over next 18 to 24 months is that playing out. But as we look here today, I think it's really going to be market dependent. So I would sit here thinking modeling very linear, right? If the market takes off faster, we should hit it faster. You know, I think, you know, I talked about if SAR grows, that's going to be a tailwind to us. If AI data center grows faster than what we've modeled here today, that'll be a tailwind to us. So there could be some step functions in there. Right now I for modeling purposes based on what you think the market is going to do you can make that call but I would think about a pretty linear progression. You've already seen over the last couple quarters we've had some nice step functions. So if the market continues to take off at this rate we could see improvement to that. So it could be better than linear.
Definitely. And the number you mentioned I mean that's just a function of exactly what the estimates out there are by the analysts. If you look at it, everybody's more confident in near-term growth and then people are not sure exactly how fast it's going to be in the outer years based on, you know, how quickly the data centers are going to be built, how many data centers can be built. So regardless of what the market grows, we are very confident in growing at least 10% over the market. Now, if you look at the last couple of years, the actual growth has actually been more than what the analysts were predicting a couple of years ago also, right? So I think as you get closer to that and I think as the estimates get more and more confident if those numbers keep going up we would definitely grow faster than that. So the numbers we have are just purely a reflection of what the four-year analyst estimates are today. That's what we're modeling it off saying we'll grow higher than the market. But if history repeats itself that growth is going to be a lot higher and we'll continue to grow with that. But like you said a lot of the high voltage is going to drive the growth. We're expecting about there's a penetration rate right the 800 volt is not going to go flip the switch and it's going to be 100%. So there's that progression along with the timing. So if we as we get closer, we see the higher than the 40 baseline that we picked that we're going to grow 10% above that. We've proven it over the last few years. We'll continue to do that, but it's really the length of that time horizon, but the content is there.
VJ Ma. Thad and Hassan. Hassan, I like your shoes there. Nice.
Just a quick question for Hassan. I think as you look at your data center side with the continent they said 15,000 going to 115,000 is that are you assuming 145 kilowatt rack going to a megawatt and can you talk to what's the mix of silicon carbide and GaN at that 145 kilowatt rack versus a 1 megawatt as obviously that helps you capitalize on some of your capabilities there.
Yeah. So, a couple of things. One is yeah, you're gonna you can think about it going from about 100 120, you know, in that range going to the megawatt. Of course, there's different hyperscalers, different capacity within the rack, but that's about the range you can think about to go from the 15 to the 115K. From a voltage perspective, we're not looking at it as here's how much vertical GaN, here's how much silicon carbide, or here's how much silicon. The whole progression of our high voltage capabilities that I've shown in my slide is really what we are targeting. If the customer is optimizing for area, then vertical GaN is how you're going to achieve that density. If the customer is optimizing for just the efficiency because they have the area for whatever reason, then we have silicon carbide already. That's why we're shipping today. The flexibility and the breadth of the portfolio in high voltage combined with intelligence and EP is going to give us the optimized solution. We're going to meet the customer where they need us to meet them. So we don't have to pick is the beauty of it because we have that breadth and the breadth comes that differentiation and we are going to meet the customer at any point of the optimization. We do that in automotive. Sudir highlighted it very well. If you want more horsepower, pack more into that area. If you want to save money, just shrink the area. That flexibility and putting it in the customer's hands is a competitive advantage that we're going to leverage.
You have one here. Okay.
Hi, Quinn Bolton from Needham. Thanks for the informative presentation. Wanted to follow up on the 800 volt data center opportunity. There's been, you know, some market chatter that 800 volt may be pushing out to the right. So, can you give us your sense when do you expect to start to see sort of the first sidecar racks beginning to ship in high volume and what are you assuming for the true 800 volt data centers, you know, with driven by solid state transformers? When does that start to come into the model?
Yeah. So from the first part of your question on the 800 volt racks with the sidecar architecture we expect that to start ramping in the next 12 to 18 months sometime towards the end of next year. Yes there are you know we there's always a concern when you come to a new market transition but there are solutions also for that that we are working very closely with our customers on so we expect that to start towards the end of next year getting to the 12 to 18 month range. For the second part of your question on the solid state transformers that might take maybe another 12 months after that. So I would say sometime in the end of 28 early 29 is when we would start the first wave of the mechanicals going to solid state essentially.
Right here.
Thank you over here Chris Caso from Wolf Research. The question is on the Synaptics acquisition and you know I know you've discussed it but aside from the financial targets wasn't the subject of a lot of discussion today. You know, give you opportunity to talk a little more about, you know, why the one plus one is more than two in that acquisition and how, you know, that may affect the rest of business going forward by having Synaptics inside the portfolio.
Yeah. Well, first you're not going to hear a lot about it because we haven't closed the deal. After announcing the deal, we're two separate companies. So, I will highlight what we've said about the markets in general. Every product that you've seen here connects to a connected compute platform that is at the center whether it's physical AI and robotics AMR and so on. So you see that leverage of one plus one with our portfolio we're able to deliver that value to customers. That's an inflection point that is forward looking. So we do see that as expanding in the future. But today you know Sudir talked about it robotics for example are happening already. So the opportunity is here today. On top of that the go to market that we talked about with the breadth in the channel that will also continue to expand. But one thing I do want to highlight and I want to correct a word you used. It's not one or the other. What you've seen here today is a very strong core that we've built for ON Semi which actually allowed us to expand our TAM into a connected compute that is built upon a very solid core that is already delivering value based on the financials that we've delivered over the last five and six years also moving forward as a core business that we had because without a solid core you can't solve a core problem with M&A we have a solid core. We are coming at it from a very strong position of power. No, no pun intended, but both technology and financial performance and adding to that expanded TAM is where Synaptics comes in once we close the deal. So, it's not one or the other. It doesn't do anything to what you've seen here today. It accelerates the financial model and it builds upon a technology and a capability that we can offer our customers as a combined company.
Thank you very much for hosting Chris Rand Susuana. I guess first a clarification and then my question just that did you contemplate pricing and pricing increases in the gross margin model or is that additive? And then for my question it's really around AI. It was a pretty remarkable TAM number the 47B. It's perhaps twice sometimes three times as large as some TAMs that competitors have given. The two biggest components in there are VCore and HVBC. Congrats on your first VCore win or your vertical or lateral power win. Can you talk about addressing this from here? Whether you have the technology to both go vertical and then eventually IVRs to address that. That'd be great. Thank you.
Yeah. So, Chris, on the margin side, sorry, I lost the question.
Yeah, I was thinking pricing in terms of margin. So yeah so you know in the last couple calls you know we've talked about and we've been very clear we're raising pricing right we're raising pricing with our customers we're in our second round that is to offset the input costs that are already hitting us today right so that will be a tailwind to margins over the short term so I think you'll see that improvement layering in over the next several quarters right that's something that is sustainable and gets us to that 53% faster but we've got the headwind of the input cost hitting the margin line already without the benefit of the pricing.
And to answer your question on you know the largest part of the market in VCore and HVBC I mean the simple answer is yes we have all the technologies we have the lateral power we have the vertical power as you're showing we're already enabling that with our partners today and even IVR we have the technology ready for it we have all the combination of capabilities for it it just depends upon when our customers want to go deploy that into their systems and what makes sense for them but being ready for all three generations of technologies for lateral and VPD and IVR we absolutely have all the technologies ready to help our customers go implement that as soon as they are ready with it.
