Synopsys had a blowout investor day on Wednesday, and the market noticed: shares jumped 10% on Thursday as the chip-design software maker unveiled fiscal 2027 guidance well above Wall Street’s estimates — plus two major deals that put it at the center of the AI chip boom, Reuters reports.
The numbers did the heavy lifting. Synopsys guided fiscal 2027 revenue to $11.10–11.20 billion versus the LSEG consensus of $10.81 billion, and earnings per share of $19.04–19.12 versus $17.81 expected. For a baseline, fiscal 2026 revenue is tracking $9.69–9.74 billion — implying roughly 15% growth next year. Management added a long-term target of ~15% compound annual revenue growth through 2030 with adjusted operating margins approaching 50%, plus a roughly $1 billion share buyback over the coming months. Twenty-two of 24 covering analysts now rate the stock a buy or higher.
GPT-Synopsys: OpenAI licenses instead of building
The more strategic announcement is the multi-year partnership with OpenAI to build “GPT-Synopsys” — a specialized AI model trained to operate Synopsys’s own EDA tools and optimize chip designs for power, performance, and area. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman said the model could “shave off weeks, months from the design process and… bring more chips to the world,” per Reuters.
The deal structure is the part the commodity rewrites skip. OpenAI is not building its own chip-design stack — it is licensing Synopsys’s tools and paying a training subscription fee, with revenue shared based on how well the model actually improves chip designs. CEO Sassine Ghazi framed it as pure upside: “We structured the agreement in a way that it will not be cannibalizing our business. It will be an upside… given we’re delivering more value to the customer.”
And the guardrails are literal. AI-generated designs will still be double-checked by Synopsys’s traditional physics verification tools. “The model needs these guardrails in order to check the physics… the need for validating with the highest level of fidelity, what we call sign-off or ground truth, is essential,” Ghazi said. AI proposes; physics disposes.
The AWS front: $1B+ for custom silicon
The second deal is quieter but structurally important: a multi-year agreement worth more than $1 billion licensing Synopsys chip-design IP to AWS, aimed at accelerating Amazon’s custom silicon for AI cloud infrastructure. Put together, Synopsys is now positioned on two fronts of the same stack — helping build the chips (OpenAI) and helping cloud providers design their own (AWS).
Why this matters: the tollbooth for AI chipmaking
Everyone tracks the GPU makers, but nobody can build a chip without EDA software — and Synopsys is the gate. The OpenAI deal is the tell: even the company with the most AI talent on the planet is choosing to *license* Synopsys’s tools and pay a training fee rather than reinvent them. That is pricing power in its purest form.
The 15% growth target through 2030 with 50% operating margins is the pitch to investors: Synopsys isn’t riding the AI boom, it taxes it. Every custom-silicon program at AWS, every AI accelerator startup, every fab buildout flows through tools like these. If the AI infrastructure trade has a picks-and-shovels layer, this is it.
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