Fermi Wang
Analyst · Susquehanna
Thank you, Louis, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining our call today. Driven by a new record level of edge AI revenue, we reported fiscal Q2 revenue slightly above the midpoint of our guidance with non-GAAP EPS of $0.18, and with guidance for seasonal fiscal Q3. By product, we are in the midst of a very steep revenue ramp with our 5-nanometer CV75 and CV72 AI SoCs. And by market, we had sequential growth in both IoT and Auto with automotive revenue driven by commercial vehicles. The market is increasingly recognizing the strategic value of edge AI as well as our edge AI and Physical AI platform leadership. We continue to make significant progress with the expansion of our edge AI platform leadership, including new go-to-market strategies and engineering and market development for a number of new higher-value AI SoCs, some of which extend our reach into entirely new markets. We remain optimistic about the long-term secular growth opportunities in the edge AI market and our R&D priorities are aligned with both the Physical AI markets that represent a vast majority of our total revenue today as well as the robotic and edge infrastructure markets that are in the early stages of developing. Altogether, our technology, product and new go-to-market combined with the significant secular growth in edge AI are increasing our 5-year serviceable market forecast today. Before I review our new market forecast, I would like to step back and discuss the market environment we are in. Demand signals for the application of edge AI remains strong. At the same time, it is obvious that memory vendors and the entire supply chains are prioritizing AI data center demand, which is resulting in rising supply chain costs for everyone. Surging memory price and the scarcity of supply are impacting the entire industry. Related to this, we are providing significant assistance to customers who are attempting to create a wide variety of workarounds to the memory situation. Ambarella itself is also facing rising supply chain costs, and we plan to pass this cost to our customers to maintain our long-term gross margin target of 59% to 62%. Returning to our rolling 5-year serviceable market update, I would like to remind you of our methodology. Our SAM for any given year is based on the products we expect to have available for production in that year, overlaid on the total available market projections from a number of third-party research firms. So our 5-year SAM captures any revenue-generating products announced or unannounced on our road map in the next 5 years. Our prior 5-year rolling SAM was announced in May 2025 and projected a 5-year fiscal year '26 to fiscal year '31 compounded annual growth rate of about 18%, with Auto representing a slightly higher proportion of the terminal year. Our new 5-year rolling SAM from $8.5 billion in fiscal year 2027 to $22.9 billion in fiscal year '32 represents a CAGR of about 20% with IoT markets now representing about 70% of the terminal year. While there are several factors behind the strong growth and the underlying mix change, I will focus on the most important change. In the last year, it has become clear that operational efficiency or the ability of our enterprise to generate more revenue and/or to reduce expenses is likely to be a key driver of our emerging edge infrastructure business. Operational efficiency at the edge refer to the use of open weight and distilled models running on on-premise inferencing hardware in contrast to the large frontier models that run in the cloud. Benefits of this approach include reduced latency, data protection, privacy, lower bandwidth costs and high reliability. Target markets include security, retail, lodging, logistics, healthcare and more. The on-premise operational efficiency use case has emerged with growing expectations for sustainable high-volume inferencing and increasingly for agentic AI and Physical AI application that can perceive, reason and ultimately act in the physical world. The key question has become who can help the enterprise lower the cost per useful AI inferencing outcome? This is where Ambarella's superior performance per watt portfolio kicks in, providing the efficient edge intelligence needed to enable this next-generation agentic and Physical AI workload at scale. With this perspective, in the last year, we have several new products in development targeting on-premise hardware or what is commonly called edge infrastructure. As you know, we already have our N1-655 AI SoC in the market, and we have additional unannounced AI SoCs in development. We also are implementing a stand-alone AI accelerator product line targeting the edge infrastructure market. Together, this new edge infrastructure products, both AI SoCs and stand-alone AI accelerators represent the single most important reason for the upward revisions in our SAM. Before I introduce our first stand-alone AI accelerator, allow me to be clear about our terminology. We define edge AI SoC as one integrating all of the accelerated computing functions into a single chip, camera perception, AI accelerators, CPUs, encoding and so on. We define an AI accelerator as an AI processor that is not camera specific and targets a wide variety of digital or physical modalities. We believe this type of multi-modality is critical for edge infrastructure applications that target operational efficiency. While not formally announced, I would like to preview one of the new AI accelerators that will anchor this new product category for us with another well-defined, well-performed product already behind it. We refer to this new AI accelerator as X7. This SoC is sampling now and expected to land initial design wins in edge infrastructure applications where it can serve as an AI coprocessor for host processors such as ARM or x86. Together with our new product thrust, expanded market reach and the SAM, we expect our revenue growth to be supported with 2 incremental go-to-market strategies. First is the multistep establishment of indirect sales channel and the second is a semi-custom chip strategy, both of which will augment our existing direct sales efforts. As a reminder, virtually all our revenue is generated by our direct sales teams. And today, I'm excited to announce 2 material partnership agreements to develop our indirect sales channel. Combined, these 2 partnership plan to drive a significant amount of incremental revenue over the next 7 years through customers who have largely been unserved by us so far. First, today, we announced Ambarella's strategy partner with CapGemini designed to help enterprise adopt edge AI and Physical AI solution faster by reducing the complexity of moving from evaluation to scalable deployment. By combining Ambarella's power-efficient AI software and platforms with CapGemini's global engineering, system integration and industry expertise, the partnership aims to help customers improve operational efficiency, enhance real-time decision-making and deploy intelligent system and in physical world environment with greater speed, scalability and confidence. In our second partnership to develop our indirect channel, today, we also announced a 7-year agreement with Macnica, a leading global technical distributor. Macnica will support both Ambarella's Physical AI and the new edge infrastructure products by developing and supporting an independent software vendor ecosystem, including onboarding, technical integration support and joint go-to-market progress. With this ecosystem in place, Ambarella solution can be offered as individual component or as a complete bundle for multiple edge AI vertical markets, including video analytics, smart city, edge computing platforms, robotics, industrial IoT, intelligent transportation systems, retail analytics, security and surveillance. I want to emphasize the importance of the indirect channel to serve small and midsized customers and highly fragmented market like robotics. However, the indirect channel is also critical to support our more complex AI SoC targeting the edge infrastructure where a broad network of partners is vital for our long-term success. Meaningful revenue is expected in 2 to 3 years and will grow as we introduce new products for the market. Our second incremental go-to-market is our semi-custom opportunity, which can enable us to gain more share in existing market and reach into new markets. We have our first semi-custom project underway, the 2-nanometer CV8 SoC, which is expected to generate first production revenue in fiscal 2028. And we are in discussion with other companies for additional semi-custom chip projects. Our representative customer engagement this quarter once again demonstrates Ambarella's expanding traction across a broad set of applications, robotics, automotive, security, trail cameras and smart video intercoms. With a CV72-based quadruped robot validates Ambarella's high resolution, high multi-camera edge AI capabilities in robotics. A major S&P 100 communication equipment company announced an AI-based enterprise video intercom, further extending our reach in the emerging access control market. We landed another win with Moultrie for AI trail cameras and win with Canon, Suprema, IDS and Sepro further strengthen our AI monitoring pipeline with CV75, CV72, CV5 wins using our own AI ISP software. Through Tier 1s, we had 2 in-cabin vehicle wins with Tier 1s in China, one for driver monitors and one -- the other for more complex camera monitor system used in Audi and the VW vehicles. The breadth of these wins and the wide variety of corresponding AI workloads highlight the programmability and the flexibility in both our AI SoCs and our Cooper Developer Platform. This ease of use is facilitating the onboarding and expansion of our indirect sales channels. Very few competitors can offer this type of proven platform with more than 50 million edge AI SoCs shipped. In conclusion, I remain very excited about the overall growth opportunity of the edge AI market and our company-specific growth drivers put us in a unique position to benefit. Ambarella is expanding beyond low-power AI SoC to deliver the complete foundation for Physical AI, and we are becoming a full stack Physical AI platform provider. With that, I will now turn it to John.