Super Micro Computer Inc. tumbled over 15% in late trading after giving preliminary results that fell well short of analysts’ estimates, a sign its comeback plan has been slow to gain traction.

Sales were $4.5 billion to $4.6 billion in the fiscal third quarter, the company said in a statement Tuesday. That missed the analyst estimate of $5.35 billion and its own guidance of roughly $5.5 billion. Earnings, excluding some items, came in at 29 cents to 31 cents in the period ended March 31, compared with an estimate of 53 cents.

Super Micro had previously been a favorite of AI-obsessed investors, after it saw an explosion in demand for servers containing high-powered graphic processing chips needed to run artificial intelligence workloads. In February, the company gave an aggressive long-term revenue outlook, saying sales will be $40 billion in the fiscal year ending in June 2026, almost twice as much as analysts’ estimates for the current fiscal year.

But the server maker said some customers delayed their purchasing, moving sales into the current quarter. The report sent the shares down about 15.6% in extended trading after closing at $36 in New York.

“Super Micro’s preannounced 15% 3Q sales miss versus prior guidance is indicative of a reliance on mega-AI deals,” Woo Jin Ho, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a note. “The company blamed the underperformance on customer-delivery timing, and given its increased inventory of older-generation GPUs, we believe customers will delay their roll out” while waiting for Super Micro’s products with Nvidia Corp.’s new Blackwell chip, he added.

Super Micro shares dropped 60% in the past 12 months after the company missed an August 2024 deadline to file its annual financial report and its auditor, Ernst & Young LLP, resigned in October, citing concerns about the company’s governance and transparency.

The San Jose, California-based company faced delisting before filing outstanding financial disclosures in late February to become compliant with Nasdaq Inc. rules.

In its statement, the company also said that gross margin for the fiscal third quarter was 220 basis points lower than the previous period, “primarily due to higher inventory reserves resulting from older generation products” and expedited costs to “enable time-to-market for new products.”

The company scheduled a conference call on May 6 to discuss the quarterly results.