Operator
Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Now it's my pleasure to hand the conference over to the Vice President of Corporate Development, Louis Gerhardy.
Please proceed.
Louis Gerhardy
Thank you, Carmen, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining our first-quarter fiscal year 2027 financial results conference call.
On the call with me today is Dr. Fermi Wang, President and CEO, and John Young, CFO.
The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding the results for our first-quarter fiscal year 2027. The discussion today and the responses to your questions will contain forward-looking statements regarding our projected financial results, financial prospects, market growth, and demand for our solutions, among other things.
These statements are based on currently available information and subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Should any of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, our actual results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements.
We are under no obligation to update these statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, as well as other information on potential risk factors that could affect our financial results, are more fully described in the documents we file with the SEC.
Access to our first-quarter fiscal year 2027 results press release, transcripts, historical results, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on the Investor Relations page of our website. The content of today's call, as well as the materials posted on our website, are Ambarella's property and cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our prior written consent.
Before starting the call, we hope to see you at some of the following investor events scheduled during our second fiscal quarter: June 2nd, we'll be at the Bank of America's TNT Conference in San Francisco; June 23rd at Northland's Virtual Equity Capital Markets Growth Conference; June 23rd and 24th, we'll be hosting investor meetings in Baltimore and Boston; and August 18th at Rosenblatt's Age of AI event. For your calendar planning in our third fiscal quarter, please note we are a sponsor at the AI Infrastructure Summit in Santa Clara on November 15th to 17th, and we hope to see you there, where we will lead the Physical AI track with a number of Edge AI product demos in our exhibit area.
Fermi will now provide a business update for the quarter, John will review the financial results and outlook, and then we'll be available for your questions. Fermi?
Fermi Wang
Thank you, Louis, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining our call today.
During our first fiscal quarter, we delivered on our key financial guidance: revenue, gross margins, and operating expenses. Most importantly, we continued to extend our Edge AI platform leadership with technology and product innovation addressing existing and emerging use cases.
As a recognized Edge AI leader, we are entering a new and significant phase for our market development with the execution of long-term customer agreements, which can drive a more predictable revenue stream while also offering lifetime revenue potential far in excess of what we have realized in the past. Let me provide a few comments about the current market environment.
In Q1, we delivered revenue at the high end of the normal season range and slightly above the midpoint of our guidance. Demand signals and the long-term secular growth outlook for Edge AI remain very strong, and I am very optimistic about our ability to serve it, in particular as AI workloads become more complex.
IoT applications were about 3/4 of our total revenue and were seasonally down, with our enterprise security camera market growing in the high single digits, sequentially offset by a double-digit sequential decline in our consumer IoT business. Our automotive revenue established a new all-time revenue record, with very strong double-digit growth led by the rapid emergency of AI within the large and growing commercial vehicle telematics market, as well as automotive safety applications.
After a multi-year build-out of AI training capacity in data centers, the AI market is increasingly focused on AI inferencing. Within the inferencing market, the processing is becoming more distributed.
In other words, processing is moving to the edge and the physical AI layers of the network hierarchy. As the edge market evolves to Gen AI and agentic AI in particular, our positioning becomes even stronger, and I would like to explain more about this.
First, before talking about Ambarella's unique positioning, let me remind you of the advantages Edge AI offers relative to the data center. Edge AI processing reduces latency, lower power consumption, minimize communication expense, and improves privacy and security.
Why is Ambarella's Edge AI platform so well-positioned? First, Ambarella's Edge AI platform is comprehensive and well-established, yet expanding and under constant evolution to adapt to new AI trends.
We believe a broad and highly programmable Edge AI platform is required to address wide number of use cases, enabling customers to be more efficient by reusing software and scaling their business. Our software platform is now open and easy to use, and supports a wide variety of AI models, with more than 200 different AI model architectures reaching production.
We have cumulatively shipped more than 46 million Edge AI SOCs, and we have 12 Edge AI SOC already available, with up to hundreds of TOPS-like performance. Another reason Ambarella is so well-positioned for Gen AI and agentic AI at the edge is that our software tools and AI SOCs integrate all the accelerated computing system functions into a single platform.
In the data centers, the functions such as data aggregation, AI acceleration, CPUs, and other system functions are usually a collection of discrete SOCs from different vendors. However, at the edge, to be successful, our AI SOC integrated all the functions: fusion, perception, AI acceleration, CPUs, encoding, and other system functions into one single chip.
Our differentiation is not just in proprietary processing elements and advanced VLSI integration, but also in the proprietary algorithms, full Edge AI stack software, and Edge AI agentic frameworks that tie the entire system together. As workloads become more complex, such as with Gen AI, multimodal reasoning, and autonomous agent-based workflows, our deep expertise across the full accelerated computing stack, optimized specifically for edge deployment, become increasingly rare and strategic value in the industry.
In other words, as our customers need more performance in their Edge AI applications, there are an extremely limited number of companies that can do this, and even fewer that are proven and established. We are now becoming recognized as one of the very few companies that can tie this all together as Edge AI workloads become more complex.
We are entering a new phase of Edge AI and the physical AI market development, where we are engaged in multiple discussions with customers who want to enter deeper relationships, including multi-generational commitments. This can take the form of long-term agreements, or LTA, that involves our standard products and/or our semi-custom AI SOC optimized for customers' particular workload.
Relative to our current customer relationships, LTAs will enable long-term partnerships that may include a structured contract involving volume and pricing, typically over five years or more. Over the long run, we expect the LTAs to be an important driver of revenue growth, improve visibility, resulting in less volatility, and improve the predictability of our revenue.
Our first LTA example involves our first 2-nanometer chip and semi-custom Edge AI SOC, which we taped out in January, and this product is named CV8. This AI SOC will serve both consumer and enterprise applications in the IoT endpoint market.
For this long-term agreement, we agreed to develop semi-custom ASIC for a customer who wants to support a certain complex AI workload. We will sell this AI SOC as a standard product to a variety of other customer in other markets.
This afternoon, we announced another material LTA, this time with Hanwha in South Korea for the enterprise CapEx side of IoT market. With Hanwha, this LTA is for the sourcing and co-development of Ambarella's Edge AI technology across Hanwha's product lines and the industry, including physical security, operational automation, life sciences, robotics, and other industry market.
The agreement has a potential revenue in excess of $800 million over a period exceeding 10 years, and represents one of the largest agreements in Ambarella history, and one of the first agreements of its kind in the Edge AI semiconductor market. The multi-generational nature of this relationship is expected to enable both company to plan jointly across technology roadmaps, accelerate product development cycles, and bring new category AI-enabled product to market at scale.
This relationship will involve standard AI SOCs we will sell in a variety of markets to our customers. Beyond these first two LTAs, we are engaged in discussions with other companies.
Today, I will also provide updates on robotic, edge infrastructure, and automotive markets, which represents material market opportunity for us. I'm very pleased to share that we now have 15-plus robotic design wins, including aerial drones, with lifetime revenue exceeding $100 million, with more than 30 customers in our robotics pipeline.
Our AI SOC combined high-performance AI inference, advanced computer vision, and ultra-efficient power consumption into a single edge-optimized architecture, and represents the foundation platform for robotics system to run Vision-Language-Action, VLA models, in drones, CV5 enabling platform such as the Antigravity A1, enabling capabilities including 8K imaging, real-time perception, autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, SLAM, and on-device AI inferencing, without relying on constant cloud connectivity for these functions. As drones evolve from flying camera into autonomous aerial robots, Ambarella's CVflow AI accelerator architecture allow manufacturer to deliver lower-latency decision-making, improved latency, longer flight time, and more advanced autonomy at the edge.
The robotics market is fragmented, and we are realizing design wins across a variety of other robotic applications, including industrial automation, autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs, delivery robots. Our AI SOC evolves from providing perception, sensor fusion, and Edge AI processing to also offer decision-making and full autonomy needed for real-time robotic awareness and action.
This convergence of high-quality imaging and AI acceleration and edge autonomy running VLA models efficiently position us as a key enabler of the broader physical AI and embodied AI ecosystems. As I mentioned earlier, our automotive business established an all-time quarterly revenue record in Q1, and is on pace to establish a new fiscal year record.
Third-party research firms indicate global automotive production is expected to decline 1% to 2% this year, but with semiconductor content per vehicle rising, market research firms also anticipate the automotive semiconductor market to grow 10% to 15% this year. We expect our automotive revenue growth to outpace these figures due to our success in commercial fleet telematics and safety applications.
The commercial fleet telematics market offers continuing and exciting growth prospects, as there is an installed telematics base in excess of 100 million vehicles growing around 10% CAGR, but only about 10% of this installed base is so far AI-enabled. We are aligned with industry AI telematics leaders who are also increasingly demanding AI SOCs that can take on not only more sensors, but more complex AI workloads.
Our platform of 12 Edge AI SOCs is very well-suited to help them scale in this market. I will also provide an update on the build-out of our indirect sales channel that we announced to augment our existing direct-to-customer business.
The development of our indirect sales channel is important to not only help us address fragmented robotic market, but also to provide support for our emerging edge infrastructure business. We have already onboarded half a dozen ISVs in vertical industry like retail, industrial automation, transportation, healthcare, and smart cities since the launch of our Developer Zone at the CES in January, with more ISVs expected to be onboard by the end of this fiscal year.
In March, for the first time ever, we had a booth at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, where we did live demonstration highlighting how Ambarella AI SOC, software stack, and developer tools deliver a competitive advantage across a wide range of AI applications, from AI agentic automation and orchestration to physical AI systems deployed in real-world environments. One of our existing design partners demonstrated real-time industrial quality inspection solution on CV72 and the N1-655.
Multiple new ISVs partners were present in our booth, including one who demonstrated a retail AI solution for in-store and drive-through optimization, another ISV demonstrated continuous training for high-speed rail network, and the third demonstrating warehouse robot solutions. In March, we also hosted an invitation-only exhibition at ISC West, showcasing how Edge AI is powering the next generation of intelligent security and physical AI systems.
At the center of our exhibit was our newly announced CV7 Edge AI vision SOC, delivering advanced imaging and on-device AI processing alongside the N1-655 Edge AI SOC, enabling edge infrastructure for low-power, high-performance enterprise security applications. One of our ISP partners demonstrated a smart city security solution based on CV75 and N1-655 solutions.
I will now briefly summarize our representative customer engagement in Q1, and it is notable, for the first time, all of the examples are based on our Edge AI SOCs: three from our CV2 family and eight from our new CV7x family. In the enterprise security, while physical security remained the principal driver of this market, we are seeing our customers develop AI application software that enabled their product to provide operational efficiency to a business.
Examples including predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and automated customer support. We expect operational efficiency in the long run become an important new growth offshoot of what we refer to as enterprise security today, in particular as Gen AI and agentic AI is deployed at the edge.
We achieved important milestone in March when i-PRO, formerly Panasonic, announced the first Edge endpoint camera to run Gen AI locally, based on the transformer capability in our CV72 AI SOC. We also have a number of other CV75 and CV72 wins in the quarter, including IDIS in South Korea; Axis in Sweden, now part of Canon; IQsite, formerly Bosch, in Germany; and with major communication equipment company in the Americas.
Notably, we had an additional CV72 win with Hanwha in South Korea, that also utilized our AI imaging signal processing software. We also won a CV22 platform with Hanwha that had another CV5 win with the major communication equipment company in the Americas.
In the industrial market, we earned another AI-based barcode reader project based on CV28, this time with Hanwha Vision, who expanding his reach beyond the traditional physical security market. In the automotive market, our safety and telematics customers' engagement activity remains strong.
For example, we are pleased to announce Lytx, an industry leader in the commercial and public sector telematics market, has design-in CV75 and the CV72 into multiple platforms. For the in-cabin pre-installed safety market, we have 72 CV72 win with South Korean-based Tier 1 Yura and a CV22FS win for a Western OEM in China.
Our new product momentum remains very strong both in terms of fiscal '27 revenue generation as well as new products that have not started to generate revenues. While our 10-nanometer CV2 family of Edge AI processor for CNN applications continue to land design wins and grow, our new 5-nanometer CV75 and CV72, capable of both advanced CNN and the transformer-based Gen AI as well as agentic AI, are in a steep production ramp and are expected to drive material incremental revenue this year.
Layered on top of this, we continue to expect our new CV7 AI processor to enter production by the end of the year. In the first half of fiscal 2028, or less than a year from now, we expect our 2-nanometer CV8 AI SOC to commence production.
All these new products I have described, as well as all the new unannounced AI SOCs we have in development, target more sophisticated AI workloads and command average ASP well above our currently $15 SOC ASP in Q1. As you can tell, we have a lot of technology, product, market, and customer development activity going.
I would like to summarize this quarter's call with three observations. First, the Edge AI market is just getting started, and momentum is building in multiple areas.
Second, Ambarella is clearly an Edge AI technology, platform, and product leader, and we are already well-established. I think our positioning is getting even stronger as Edge AI workloads get more complex, and there become fewer and fewer company capable of integrating all the Edge accelerated computing functions into a single chip.
Third, customers are recognizing the first two points, and now want to engage with us more broadly and more deeply. For example, LTA agreements can build stronger relationships and get us designed into new markets like robotics, while the indirect channel sales ecosystem bring us more scale.
In conclusion, as all this comes together, we intend to drive shareholder value with strong revenue growth and a more diversified and predictable financial models that offer material operating leverage potential for our shareholders. With that, John will now discuss our Q1 results and Q2 outlook in more detail.
John?
John Young
Thank you, Fermi. I'll now review the financial highlights for the first quarter fiscal year 2027 ending April 30th, 2026.
I will also provide a financial outlook for our second quarter of fiscal year 2027 ending July 31st, 2026. I'll be discussing non-GAAP results and ask that you refer to today's press release for a detailed reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results.
For non-GAAP reporting, we have eliminated stock-based compensation and acquisition-related expenses, adjusted for the impact of taxes. For fiscal Q1, revenue was $100.4 million, slightly above the midpoint of our prior guidance range of $97 to $103 million, down 0.5% from the prior quarter and up 16.9% year-over-year.
On a sequential basis, automotive revenue driven by commercial vehicles experienced a strong, above-seasonal double-digit percent increase, while IoT revenue was seasonally down. Non-GAAP gross margin for fiscal Q1 was 59.9%, slightly above the midpoint of our prior guidance range of 59% to 60.5%.
Non-GAAP operating expense in Q1 was $56.4 million, slightly below the midpoint of our prior guidance range of $55 to $58 million. Q1 net interest and other income was $2.1 million.
Q1 non-GAAP tax provision was approximately $740,000. We reported a non-GAAP net profit of $5 million, or 11 cents per diluted share in Q1.
Now I'll turn to our balance sheet and cash flow. Fiscal Q1 cash and marketable securities were $277.8 million, decreasing $34.8 million from the prior quarter, but increasing $18.4 million from the same quarter a year ago.
The sequential decrease in cash and marketable securities was primarily due to an increase in our inventory levels to better service our customers in the face of a number of new product cycles. Receivables days sales outstanding of 35 in Q1 was flat with the prior quarter, while days of inventory increased from 99 to 145 days.
Operating cash outflow was $25.6 million for the quarter. Capital expendi- expenditures for tangible and intangible assets were $4 million for the quarter.
Free cash outflow was $29.6 million for the quarter. During the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, we repurchased 47,798 shares of our stock for total consideration of $2.4 million, or an average price of $51.04 per share.
During the second fiscal quarter, Ambarella's Board of Directors authorized a new $50 million repurchase program, valid through June 30th, 2027, replacing the program that expires on June 30th, 2026. The repurchase program does not obligate the company to acquire any particular amount of ordinary shares, and it may be suspended at any time at the company's discretion.
We had one logistics company representing 10% or more of our revenue: WT Microelectronics, a fulfillment partner in Taiwan that ships to multiple customers in Asia, came in at 60.7% of revenue for the quarter for the first quarter. I'll now discuss the outlook for the second quarter of fiscal year 2027.
We forecast a seasonally strong fiscal second quarter, with revenue in the range of $105 to $111 million, or $108 million at the midpoint. Sequentially, both auto and IoT revenue are expected to increase, with growth in both consumer and CapEx-driven markets.
We expect fiscal Q2 non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 59% to 60.5%. We expect non-GAAP OpEx in the second quarter to be in the range of 56 million to $59 million.
We estimate net interest and other income to be approximately $1.9 million, our non-GAAP tax expense to be approximately $800,000, and our diluted share count to be approximately 44.3 million shares. Thank you for joining our call today.
With that, I will turn the call over to the operator for questions.
Operator
Thank you so much. As a reminder, if you do have a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
To remove yourself, press star one one again. Our first question is from Ross Seymore with Deutsche Bank.
Please proceed.
Ross Seymore
Hi, guys. Thanks for letting me ask a question.
You mentioned earlier about the auto side growing faster than the end market itself. I think you said that end market will be 10% to 15%.
In the past, you've given full-year fiscal year revenue guidance. I think you said 10% to 15% on your last call.
How are you thinking about that for this year now?
Fermi Wang
I think for the whole year we're still thinking it's probably 10% to 15%. We are not changing that.
The automotive is stronger, grows faster than the other market.
Ross Seymore
Okay. Then on the LTA side of things and maybe the one that you announced tonight in the 8-K with the $800 million over time, but more conceptually, how are you thinking about those?
Are they going to be guaranteed revenues? I think you said the word "potential revenue."
How do we build that into the estimates as we think forward for the company?
Fermi Wang
Right. We already have a run rate with Hanwha for the last 15 years, and we know we only take a percentage of their current market share.
We expect with this LTA, we're going to gain market share on their annual run rate, as well as this is a multi-generational commitment on both sides. We're going to talk about at least two generations of silicon that will be co-developed between these two companies.
I think from that point of view, we believe that it's a long period of time of commitment, as well as getting market shares from the Hanwha. At the same time, if you look at our current ASP, although our corporate ASP is $15, but our CV ASP is a lot higher than that.
If you put all the things together, that's how we calculate this potential $800 million.
Louis Gerhardy
Ross, just a little background on Hanwha. It's a major multinational conglomerate with more than $60 billion in annual revenue.
It's involved in aerospace, defense, robotics, physical security, life sciences, industrial, ocean solutions, chemicals, a lot of different things, retail services. An important part of this relationship in the intermediate to long term is moving beyond what has just been the physical security relationship that Fermi described as our current run rate.
We can gain share on that business, but at the same time, the press release talks about, in addition to physical security, things like operational automation, life sciences, robotics, other industrial markets. That's another very important angle of this relationship.
Ross Seymore
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question.
It comes from Tore Svanberg with Stifel. Please proceed.
Tore Svanberg
Yes. Thank you.
Maybe a question to follow up on the LTA, and not the Hanwha one specifically, but how should we think about these sort of folding in here over the next few years? Obviously, these could be quite large.
I'm sure you can't say yes to all of them. Is there also going to be potentially some OpEx sharing with some of these customers that you sign LTAs with?
Any more color you could offer us as far as how we should think about the magnitude and how it's going to be funded over the next few years? Thank you.
Fermi Wang
I think I want to go a little high level on saying the most of LTA discussion is based on two things. One is really when you look at all the fast AI trend, and our customer continue to look at the new AI model that implement higher-performance requirement, lower-power efficiency.
To meet this kind of AI demand, while for the most Edge AI application power efficiency is probably the most important thing. It's getting harder and harder to build a platform of silicon that can address all of this new application.
I think that trend really help our customer to think about how to partner with somebody that can build a platform of silicon that can help them not only on the enterprise security, but also other associated market they are trying to address. I think that's probably how the LTA started.
In this kind of LTA, most of the discussion will involve NRE, but also will develop a product mutually beneficial, right? I think those are two things that we definitely want to make sure that we develop a software platform that can go across our current silicon platform that offer a complete roadmap to our customer.
In exchange, they are willing to help us to fund those platform with NRE, particularly not only on the silicon side, but also on the software side.
Tore Svanberg
That's very helpful. As my follow-up, and maybe related to that platform approach, Fermi, just thinking about the competitive landscape, obviously there's big processor companies, there's obviously analog companies and so on and so forth, but how flexible can your software platform really be?
Because obviously the use cases at the edge are going to be quite different from use case to use case. Thank you.
Yeah.
Fermi Wang
I think our unique architecture, you remember that we have been talking about algorithm-first, our let's say hardware accelerator like our image processing and our CVflow AI accelerator has been really passed many battles and being proved to our customer. It's not only power-efficient, but also programmable enough to adapt to many different application, different AI models.
For example, just talk about our CVflow architecture can do 200 different model architecture, not 200 models. We're talking about 200 model architectures, and took all of them into production.
Just show you how flexible our accelerator is. More importantly, with the latest agentic AI approach, you need to integrate everything together.
That including not only the ISP and CVflow or MPEG encoder H.264 encoder. On top of that, you need to integrate a complete SOC for CPU and also IO and DRAM activity to provide not only power-efficient, but also cost-efficient solution to our customer.
That's where we are basically having a reputation to deliver those kind of products consistently in the last 20 years. When we look at competitive landscape, with NVIDIA, with Qualcomm, obviously, but I really don't see any other people coming out with, one, a complete silicon platform that we have 12 Edge AI SOC can go from very low performance to few hundred TOPS performance with power efficiency.
On top of that, all the silicon was covered by one unified software development SDK that our customer, if they develop one product on one SOC, can easily go to a different SOC providing a different price and performance point on their product platform. This kind of flexibility and the width of our product format, I don't think there are many people can match.
Tore Svanberg
That's great color. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question, please.
It comes from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. Please proceed.
Quinn Bolton
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question.
I guess I wanted to follow up, Fermi, on the Hanwha LTA. In the press release, it talked about an internal SOC that Hanwha continues to design, and so I wonder, it sounds like you're co-designing multiple generations of chips.
Is there an opportunity to get a bigger percentage of share away from that internal SOC, or do you think that internal SOC continues to hold a portion of Hanwha's requirements? Then I've got a follow-up.
Fermi Wang
I think it's a mutual intention that they're going to use more of this co-developed platform into more product lines, we fully expect we're getting more market share from Hanwha with this new development.
Quinn Bolton
Excellent. Then, Fermi, you guys have talked about the fleet telematics market for a number of years, and it feels like it may finally be starting to inflect.
On the script, you mentioned an installed base of over 100 million units, with less than 10 of that being AI, but what do you think is driving the inflection? Is there anything you can point to in particular that's driving the pretty strong growth here in the first and second quarter?
Louis Gerhardy
Hey, Quinn, it's Louis. Just in terms of the market opportunity, telematics, there's about 100 million subscribers.
Third-party research firms, like ABI or Gartner, see it growing maybe 10% CAGR. Within that 100 million subscriber base, maybe only 15%, 20% of the market is using AI and AI video as an additional ARPU-generating feature in their platforms.
What you have is the overall telematics market growing, you've got AI video growing into that, and at the same time, there's demand for more sophisticated AI workloads and multiple sensors, which is causing our ASP, the demand for more sophisticated Edge AI chips to go up. Those are the dynamics that we're facing, and we're doing very good job with share.
For example, this quarter we announced Lytx, as Fermi mentioned, multiple platforms with CV72, CV75, they're one of the leaders of this market. Any follow-ups on that?
Quinn Bolton
No, that's great. Thanks, Louis.
Thank you, Fermi.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Joe Moore with Morgan Stanley.
Please proceed.
Joe Moore
Yes. Thank you.
Wonder if you could talk about are you guys impacted at all by shortages of DRAM or storage in any of the surveillance markets or consumer markets, just seeing any impact from any of that?
Fermi Wang
Yeah. Obviously, just like everybody else, we are impacted, but not directly, we are impact indirectly.
In the last quarter, when we talked about this, we definitely talk about our customer facing much higher DRAM price and flash price, as well as potential shortages in second half. That situation didn't change.
The biggest direct impact to us is most of our customer are handling this DRAM shortages by doing, first of all, they are trying to source different DRAM supplier, or to cut down the DRAM utilization per product, or basically how to optimize the DRAM utilization in the chip so that they can use a smaller DRAM size. All those activities require we putting our FAE support to help our customer.
We are happy to do that, because that's definitely something we need to do it to help our customer. At the same time, I think that's probably the biggest direct impact to us on the engineering resource requirement.
Joe Moore
Okay. Thank you.
Then as a follow-up, the inventory, you sort of described it supporting product ramps, but it was a pretty big increase. If you could give us any more color, make us feel comfortable with that amount of inventory built.
Thank you.
Louis Gerhardy
Hi, Joe. If you look back in the last couple of quarters, we were running kind of lean, and over the last few quarters, we have looked at kind of the opportunities that were coming to us with the strong growth that we had last year, and we wanted to position ourselves in the right product categories to be able to continue to serve our customers.
Going from a fairly low number of days of inventory at points in last year, we wanted to build a bit of inventory heading into this year to be able to do that.
Fermi Wang
Joe, it's Fermi, just want to add another color on this. Samsung has officially informed us that their supply is getting tighter.
Obviously, we have secured our supply, but we feel it's prudent for us to build up a little inventory just in case that we run into a different supply issue. From that point of view, I think you also heard that supply chain become a problem for everybody.
We're just trying to be prudent, to build up some inventory just in case.
Joe Moore
Makes sense. Thank you so much.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Cassidy with Rosenblatt Securities.
Please proceed.
Kevin Cassidy
Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and congratulations on all the great progress.
Along those lines, you're building out the indirect sales channel. I think you mentioned six groups hired.
Maybe if you could describe these a little better geographically, and then also, do they have application engineers? I'll just stop with those questions.
Fermi Wang
Right. They are mainly in the United States right now, obviously, but we are definitely trying to go to Japan and Europe to expand our ISV.
Today, all six of them are US-based. In terms of size of those ISVs, it's really from large to small, but more importantly is really that what's their current engagement with the end customer.
We're looking at ISV can add value, can easily port their software onto our platform, and so they can go to their existing customer with our solution. Those are the ISVs we are engaging.
More importantly, they are really enabling applications that we have not touched in the past. From that point of view, we are happy with the progress we made in a short period of time since we announced this at CES, but I think six of them is just a beginning.
I think our goal is to double that in this year, and hopefully we can continue to build a momentum based on that.
Louis Gerhardy
Kevin, it's Louis. In addition to the ISVs we just talked about, there's significant effort building out channel partners and even system integrators as part of this effort.
This is really important to help us serve markets like edge infrastructure that need a lot of technical support, or very fragmented markets like robotics. A lot of efforts going into the ISVs, channel partners, and even system integrators.
Kevin Cassidy
Great. That was going to be part of my follow-up question of how much of I hate to use the term, but the cookie-cutter approach can it be that someone can go in with a lot of the solution already and help out a customer?
Is that the idea?
Fermi Wang
Yeah.
Louis Gerhardy
You might have multiple ISVs working on one project. If I understood the question right, it's not just always something right off the shelf, cookie-cutter, as you said, but you might have ISVs, you might have channel partners, and you might have system integrators all involved on one project.
I think it's pretty far from being cookie-cutter. It's very sophisticated software, as these workloads get more complex.
You need that whole indirect ecosystem to play a role in many of these designs we're pursuing.
John Young
Kevin, just to add, part of the decision-making in engaging with some of these ISVs is, seeing the expertise that they have in different verticals. They have expertise across multiple verticals, and so it's really, trying to take a holistic approach to that engagement and cover as many verticals as we can with folks who specialize.
Kevin Cassidy
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Rolland with Susquehanna.
Please proceed.
Christopher Rolland
Thanks so much for the question, guys. My question is, I think a few quarters ago you talked about doing some infrastructure, putting your chips basically into servers.
I think it was for security camera applications, but potentially other. Have you had any other further engagements there on the infrastructure side?
Fermi Wang
Yes, we do. Our edge infrastructure continue to be a focus, and we have N1-655.
We have not only engaged with customers, we also have design wins that we're working on. The first product will probably come out, I would say, second half of this year.
In the same time, we are definitely building a roadmap to continue to address this opportunity. We haven't talked about our next-generation chip and also the potential updates on that, but I think next time we should give you more updates on the edge infrastructure.
That's remain to be a very important direction for us.
Louis Gerhardy
Just to put it in perspective, based on the products we have now, it's a couple-hundred-million-dollar SAM for things like AI vision box. As we come out with more products and build out this indirect ecosystem that, as we mentioned, will help the edge infrastructure business, you'll see us update the SAM appropriately, when we have more products here.
Definitely a high focus area, and it's part of that indirect channel we were just talking about.
Christopher Rolland
Great. Thank you, Louis.
Thank you, Fermi. Then for my second question, just the robotics opportunity, I think last quarter you mentioned warehouse robotics.
Any other engagements there? Then if you could talk about humanoids and engagements there, that'd be interesting, too.
Fermi Wang
Right. We talked about the different applications this time.
In fact, last time we talked about this warehouse design win, and now we are definitely in a extensive engineering development cycle with them. More importantly, on top of that, we have multiple design wins in this quarter in the spend of many different applications.
I talk about them in my script. I think the most important things, now we focus on that for any robots, there are multiple different solutions today.
One is just purely video, the other one is perception, the third one is using fusion to put the different sensors together, and fourth one is really become the controller or decision-maker for this whole robot system. Our design win is in all these areas, but more focus on the perception side, because our expertise on the video and also fusion side.
I think it's across different applications, and also focus on perception, and also decision-making part of the robotic solution. There are some of the humanoid-type of applications in that design wins, but we are not in a place to talk about just yet.
Christopher Rolland
Excellent. Thank you, Fermi.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question, that comes from Martin Yang with Oppenheimer.
Please proceed.
Martin Yang
Hi. Thank you for taking my question.
First, a couple of questions on LTA. Are you able to say or quantify how many other potential partners you have in your LTA discussion?
Fermi Wang
We only announce two. We are talking about potential, but there's no other concrete info we can disclose at this point.
Martin Yang
Got it. Then also on LTA, for example, the one with Hanwha spanning over multiple years, do you need to also secure wafer supply from your foundry partner regarding those LTA agreements?
Fermi Wang
I believe that our relationship with Samsung, although we only try to secure wafer commitment every year, but in the last 18 years, we never have a problem to secure the wafer we want for our customer. I expect that our wafer supply for 5 or 2-nanometer from Samsung will not be an issue for us, although that there's a lot of discussion that Samsung is also gaining momentum on those process node.
Obviously, we don't have any long-term contract with any suppliers, that might be a question you're asking, but I don't think that's a contract we're going to sign with any supplier at any time soon.
Martin Yang
Got it. Last question, also on LTA, do you view your relationship with Samsung and your design capabilities as a key value prop when you try to secure long-term agreements with other customers?
Fermi Wang
Absolutely. Because one long discussion with any customer on LTA is how you secure your wafers, particularly on the 4-nanometer, 2-nanometer process node.
In fact, some of the time we have to really bring [laughs] our supplier partners into a conversation to make sure our customer feel comfortable with it. By the way, I can say that today Samsung has their official company-wide event talking about their 2-nanometer process, and they made announcement that NVIDIA and Ambarella are the true 2-nanometer customers that commit to their process node.
That's a official press release from Samsung.
Martin Yang
That's great. Thank you, Fermi.
Operator
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, simply press star one one to get in the queue.
That is star one one to get in the queue. Our next question is from Suji Desilva with ROTH Capital.
Please proceed.
Suji Desilva
Hi, Fermi. Hi, John.
Hi, Louis. Quick question on robotics as well.
I'm curious, you have a breath of wins there, are those across the board on your product portfolio or does that category lean toward the leading-edge products, the leading-edge nodes? Just want to understand where robotics is intercepting your product portfolio.
Fermi Wang
All the products that we have design win is our CV product line. Most of them is our 5-nanometer 5-nanometer products.
There are some 10-nanometer, but majority is 5-nanometer products. In fact, there are also our 4-nanometer products in there, too.
It's really covering our CVflow architecture. That's the main reason people are using us, but more focus on the 5-nanometer for the performance efficiency.
Suji Desilva
Got it. Okay.
Then a question perhaps for John. Should we expect typical seasonality this fiscal year or this calendar year, or are there factors that might be swinging it differently than prior years?
John Young
Suji, I think the expectation is to continue to see the seasonality that we've seen in the past at this point.
Suji Desilva
Okay. Great.
Thanks, John. Thanks, everyone.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Ross Seymore with Deutsche Bank.
Please proceed.
Ross Seymore
Hi, guys. Just one follow-up for you.
Given the change in the business, more automotive this year relative to the IoT side, and then longer term, some of the robotics and IoT and Edge AI, physical AI, everything you've talked about on the call, how do you see that impacting, either benefiting or being a little bit of a headwind to your gross margin in both the near term and long term from those dynamics, please?
Fermi Wang
Right. Ross, in fact, since three quarters ago, we start really watching our gross margin carefully.
I think that today what I can say is based on all the things we just discussed, we believe that we are going to stay with our current long-term gross margin model, that's between 59% to 62%.
Ross Seymore
Got it.
Fermi Wang
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session, and I will pass it back to Dr.
Fermi Wang for closing comments.
Fermi Wang
Thank you for joining our call today, and I really hope I can see you at some of our events this quarter. Thank you.
See you next time.
Operator
This concludes our conference. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.