Jabil Guides to $44.5 Billion in Fiscal 2027 Revenue as AI Infrastructure Demand Outstrips Supply, Says Business Remains Early-Cycle
Q4 and full-year fiscal 2026 earnings call and ninth annual investor briefing, September 30, 2026
Jabil used its annual investor briefing to lay out one of the more aggressive growth algorithms in its history, guiding to $44.5 billion of revenue in fiscal 2027, up 24% year-over-year, with core earnings per share of $17.55, up roughly 34%. The company is coming off a fiscal 2026 in which it added more than $6 billion of incremental revenue, and management now expects to add another $8.5 billion in fiscal 2027 — a figure CEO Mike Dastoor and Investor Relations chief Adam Berry both described as "unprecedented" for the company. The headline message was straightforward: demand across AI infrastructure continues to run ahead of the capacity Jabil has been building, and the company believes it is still early in a multiyear investment cycle rather than late.
AI Demand Is Outrunning Supply, and Most of It Is Inference, Not Frontier Training
The most important strategic point management wanted to land was about the composition of its AI exposure. Matt Crowley, who leads the Intelligent Infrastructure segment, was explicit that Jabil's demand is not concentrated in the handful of frontier labs training the largest models. "The AI spending that makes headlines is at the frontier, small number of labs training the most capable models on the largest clusters ever built. Most of our business is not there. It is in deployed AI models that already exist, running at scale for the world's largest cloud platforms and the enterprises they serve," Crowley said. He added that direct exposure to frontier model developers represents "a small fraction" of AI-related revenue, with the bulk tied to inference workloads that scale with usage rather than with any single model's success.
That framing matters for how investors should think about volatility in the AI trade. Dastoor reinforced the point later on the call, noting that demand is "way outweighing supply right now" in data center infrastructure and that he does not see AI growth slowing "anytime soon" given the expansion of inference workloads. Jabil ended fiscal 2026 with four AI customers generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue, up from just one two years ago, and expects that to reach five customers in fiscal 2027 and six across the broader Intelligent Infrastructure segment. A third hyperscale customer was added in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, though management said that relationship will contribute only modestly in fiscal 2027, with "the greater opportunity beyond that."
Segment Guidance: Intelligent Infrastructure Carries the Load, But Not Alone
Within Intelligent Infrastructure, Jabil guided to approximately $25.6 billion of revenue in fiscal 2027, up about 43%, with AI-related revenue specifically climbing to $22.1 billion, up 54% and representing another $7.7 billion of incremental dollars on top of an already larger base than the company had modeled back in June. Cloud and data center infrastructure, the largest end market within the segment, is expected to grow approximately 52% to $17.5 billion, helped by the ramp of a second hyperscale customer in Mexico that Dastoor said he expects to become a 10%-plus customer of the company in fiscal 2027. Capital equipment is guided to grow 40% to $4.2 billion as the wafer fab equipment cycle inflects higher alongside continued strength in automated test equipment. Networking and communications is guided up only 15% to $3.9 billion at the reporting-segment level, but Crowley clarified that the underlying networking business is actually growing 45% to 50%, with the blended figure dragged down by a soft legacy communications and 5G business.
Regulated Industries, which includes automotive, defense and aerospace, healthcare and packaging, and renewable and energy infrastructure, is guided to approximately $13.6 billion of revenue, up about 7%. Automotive and transportation is expected to grow 9% to $5 billion, helped by what Steve Borges, who leads the segment, described as a more balanced technology mix — the company has cut the share of electrification and powertrain programs in its automotive portfolio from roughly 80% in fiscal 2023 to about 40% in fiscal 2026 as it leans into software-defined vehicle, compute and advanced driver assistance programs. Healthcare and packaging is guided up 6% to $5.6 billion, with Borges noting the healthcare pipeline for fiscal 2028 "looks robust." Intelligent Devices & Robotics — the newly renamed version of the former Connected Living & Digital Commerce segment — is guided down about 2% to $5.3 billion, as an 11% increase in Digital Commerce & Robotics is more than offset by a 15% decline in Connected Living, where Jabil says it is deliberately walking away from low-margin, low-complexity programs rather than competing on cost.
An Asset-Light Model That Jabil Says Few Competitors Can Match
Management spent considerable time making the case that Jabil's AI infrastructure build-out is structurally less capital intensive than peers'. Net capital expenditures came in at just 1.3% of revenue in fiscal 2026, down from 2.9% in fiscal 2020, even as the company supported $36 billion of revenue on roughly $470 million of net capex. CFO Greg Hebard guided to net capex of 1.5% to 2% of revenue going forward, and Dastoor noted that within Intelligent Infrastructure specifically, capital intensity is "closer to 1% of revenue." Core return on invested capital has nearly tripled since fiscal 2020 to 59%. "It tells me the quality of the business is improving, not just the size," Dastoor said. The company is adding roughly 4 million square feet of manufacturing capacity to support the fiscal 2027 ramp, concentrated in the U.S., Mexico, India, Brazil and Vietnam, and executives were clear that this capacity is tied to already-booked programs rather than speculative build-out — a point Crowley called central to Jabil's returns advantage over competitors that build proprietary power and cooling platforms and ask customers to standardize on them.
Memory Tightness and Supply Chain Are the Real Watch Items
Chief Supply Chain Officer Francis McKay flagged a genuine constraint investors should monitor: memory is being reallocated toward AI and hyperscale demand, tightening availability across Jabil's more diversified end markets. He characterized this as "a structural shift in global capacity compounded by ongoing geopolitical disruption," rather than a temporary squeeze. Jabil's mitigation strategy leans on roughly 120 strategic suppliers it says it treats like customers, sharing roadmaps and executive relationships on the view that "in constrained markets, allocation follows trust as much as order size does." Net inventory days stood at 64 at quarter-end, down four days sequentially but still above the company's 55-to-60-day target range; management expects a return to that range as the year progresses, contingent on continued customer support through inventory deposits.
Defense, Healthcare and Energy Infrastructure Add Ballast
Beyond AI, Jabil highlighted defense and aerospace as an increasingly meaningful growth driver as new programs move into production, with Borges pointing to Jabil's status as a U.S.-based, ITAR-compliant manufacturer with security-cleared personnel as a real barrier to entry. In healthcare, the company expects to manufacture more than 700 million injectors and delivery pens in fiscal 2027 across insulin delivery, biologics and weight-loss therapies, and its Croatia facility remains on track to reach full production in fiscal 2028, with only a modest GLP-1 contribution embedded in the fiscal 2027 guide. Renewable and energy infrastructure is guided up 7% to $3 billion, with growth broadening beyond residential solar into commercial projects and energy storage tied to data center power demand.
Physical AI and Robotics: Real but Early
Rafael Renno, who now leads the renamed Intelligent Devices & Robotics segment, pointed to a live customer reference from Symbotic, whose VP of procurement, Michael Trueblood, said Jabil has scaled the company's robot production from entering mass production in early 2024 to nearly 20,000 bots currently. Dastoor was candid that broader physical AI commercialization remains nascent: "real-world deployment is negligible, especially in the West," he said, citing cost and complexity as the binding constraints, and noted China may be ahead of the U.S. on adoption. Jabil has built essentially no physical AI contribution into its fiscal 2027 guide, with Dastoor suggesting the inflection could arrive in fiscal 2028 or 2029, while arguing the company's existing capabilities in sensors, onboard compute, actuation, thermal management and liquid cooling position it well once the market does inflect.
Capital Returns and Margin Trajectory
Jabil generated $1.5 billion of adjusted free cash flow in fiscal 2026, ahead of its initial $1.3 billion-plus target, and guided to approximately $1.6 billion in fiscal 2027. The company repurchased $1.1 billion of shares in fiscal 2026, has cut shares outstanding by 49% since fiscal 2013, and began drawing on a new $1.5 billion buyback authorization approved by its board in July, with $1.4 billion remaining at year-end. Management reiterated its long-standing commitment to return 80% or more of adjusted free cash flow to shareholders over time. Core operating margin is guided to 6.1% in fiscal 2027, up 30 basis points, though Dastoor and Hebard both flagged that margins will be back-half weighted given the costs associated with ramping new capacity — yield, training and other startup expenses that precede the revenue benefit. Analysts pressed on first-quarter guidance implying an annualized run-rate already close to $44 billion, but Dastoor maintained the full-year figure reflects appropriate conservatism given geopolitical and supply chain uncertainty, while acknowledging upside is possible with "flawless execution."