AEHR — FY2026 Financial Report Analysis

Overview

Aehr Test Systems' fiscal 2026 (the 52 weeks to May 29, 2026) was two different years stacked together. For the full year, revenue fell 15.2% to $50.0 million and the net loss widened to $7.1 million, because orders from electric-vehicle chipmakers — historically almost all of Aehr's business — kept shrinking. But in the fourth quarter alone, revenue rose 33.7% to $18.8 million, Aehr posted its first GAAP profit in a year ($1.4 million), booked a record $60.7 million of new orders, and ended with an $80.6 million backlog against $15.2 million a year earlier. The new orders came mostly from AI processors and silicon photonics (chips that move data with light inside data centers), not from EVs. Management is guiding fiscal 2027 revenue to $130–150 million, 2.6x to 3.0x this year's.

At a glance

• Backlog $80.6M, up from $15.2M — confirmed orders scheduled to ship within 12 months now equal 1.6x all of fiscal 2026's revenue; "effective backlog" including orders received after year-end is $100.6M.
• EV and power chips fell to 17% of revenue, from 41% in FY2025 and 92% in FY2024 — the company that was a silicon carbide (EV chip) story two years ago now earns most of its revenue elsewhere.
• Cash $116.4M, up from $24.5M — but $97.4M of that came from selling new shares, not from the business, which used $3.3M of cash in operations.

What Aehr does, and why silicon carbide mattered so much

Aehr sells "burn-in" equipment: machines that run chips hot and at stress voltages for hours so the weak ones fail in the factory instead of in a customer's product. This matters most where a failure is expensive or dangerous. Silicon carbide (SiC) power chips — used in EV inverters and chargers because they handle high voltages with less energy loss than ordinary silicon — are a prime example, and Aehr's FOX systems test them while still on the whole wafer (before the wafer is cut into individual chips). Each different chip design needs its own "WaferPak" contactor, a custom full-wafer probe card that Aehr also sells, so WaferPaks behave partly like recurring consumables.

In fiscal 2024, EV and power semiconductors were 92% of Aehr's revenue and one customer alone was 67%. As EV-related chip demand slowed, that concentration turned into the main source of the decline.

Results