Earnings Call Transcript
ARM HOLDINGS PLC /UK (ARM)
Earnings Call Transcript - ARM Q3 2024
Operator, Operator
Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Arm's Third Quarter Fiscal Year-End 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now like to hand the call over to Head of Investor Relations, Ian Thornton. Please go ahead.
Ian Thornton, Head of Investor Relations
Thank you, Latif. Thank you, everybody. My name is Ian Thornton, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Arm. I would like to welcome you to our earnings conference call for the third quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. I'm joined today by Rene Haas, the Chief Executive Officer of Arm; and Jason Child, Arm's Chief Financial Officer. Hopefully, you will all have downloaded and read the shareholder letter. If not, it is available on the Arm Investor Relations website at investors.arm.com. The shareholder letter provides a rich update on our strategic progress in the quarter. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that during the course of this conference call, Arm will discuss forecasts, targets and other forward-looking information regarding the company and its financial results. While these statements represent our best current judgment about the future results and performance as of today, our actual results are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. In addition to any risks that we highlight during this call, important risk factors that may affect our future results and performance are described in our registration statement on Form S-1 filed with the SEC on September 14, 2023. Arm assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they are made. In addition, we refer to non-GAAP financial measures during the discussion. Reconciliations of certain of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and a discussion of certain projected non-GAAP financial measures that we were not able to reconcile without unreasonable efforts and supplementary financial information can be found in the shareholder letter that we released earlier today. The shareholder letter and other earnings related materials are available on our website at investors.arm.com. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Rene, who has some prepared remarks.
Rene Haas, CEO
Thank you, Ian, and good afternoon, good evening, everyone. So I'd like to take a few different comments about the quarter, and then I'll turn it over to Jason for some specifics and then, we'll open it up to Q&A. We had an outstanding third quarter inside the company. We could not be more pleased. Record revenues, we exceeded the high end of the range for the guidance and we are extremely pleased about results overall. For Q4, we're expecting another record quarter, and to that end, we've also raised guidance on which Jason is going to give more color on. But a little bit regarding the why and how we got here. Arm has the most fundamental, foundational pervasive compute platform really in the history of digital design. Over 280 billion units in the 30 plus years that Arm has been a company have been built. And that has underpinned a software ecosystem and hardware ecosystem like no other. Given the fact that a CPU design is really driven by the hardware and the software, it creates a flywheel for continuous development. That is, the more hardware that exists on Arm, the more software that's written for Arm; the more software that's written for Arm, the more popular the hardware. So we're building off a fantastic base that when we look at what happened in the last quarter, not only did we see growth driven by a number of factors but growth that we think is long term and sustainable. For royalties specifically around some of the products that shipped in the quarter, we've seen a significant transition now continuing from our v8 product to our v9 product. Our v9 product garners roughly double the royalty rate of the equivalent v8 product, and whereas in the previous quarter that was about 10% of our revenue for royalties, it has now moved to 15%. We are seeing strong momentum and tailwinds from all things AI. From the most complex devices on the planet for training and inference, the NVIDIA Grace Hopper 200 to edge devices such as the Gemini Nano Pixel 6 from Google or the Samsung Galaxy S24, more and more AI is running on more end devices, and that’s all running on Arm. This has driven a very strong set of tailwinds for our licensing growth. When we look at demand for new products from a licensing standpoint, we are finding from the end market that we've reached nowhere near good enough relative to the capability of the technology, and end customers for new designs are needing more and more Arm technology to keep up, particularly with the AI demands. With that, our licensing growth has been very strong. We've also seen proof points around one of our strategies that we call Compute Subsystems. These are complete finished blocks of designs that we put together for our end customers that will save them significant time around validation of their engineering work and also around time-to-market relative to cycling products to the fab. One of the very first designs that was made public that uses this is the Microsoft Cobalt, which uses our Neoverse cores of 128 CPUs to be specific. We worked very closely with Microsoft around these designs using Compute Subsystems, and we see this trend only gaining momentum. So between strong growth in royalties driven by the transition from v8 to v9, all things AI needing energy efficient compute and Compute Subsystems, we feel very strongly positioned for growth. This is completely underpinned by an ecosystem of devices that are in the installed base and a very large software community that develops on Arm. So with that, I will turn it over to Jason and then we'll open it up for Q&A.
Jason Child, CFO
Thank you, Rene. I'm going to briefly touch on guidance for the fourth quarter and full year. Starting with revenues. For fiscal Q4, we are guiding to a range of $850 million to $900 million with a mid-point of $875 million. This represents a raise of over $95 million compared to our prior implied guidance for the fourth quarter. When combined with our strong Q3 performance, the full year revenue guidance rises to $3.155 billion to $3.205 billion, an increase of $160 million at the midpoint versus prior. Within Q4 total revenue, we expect royalty revenues to grow mid-single digits sequentially and to be up over 30% year-over-year as we compare against the bottom of the industry-wide inventory correction that occurred in prior year Q4. Royalty revenue sequential growth is mainly coming from the increasing penetration of Armv9, where royalty rates are on average, at least double the rates on equivalent Armv8 products. Additionally, we are seeing an increasing amount of Arm technology in chips being deployed and as the amount of Arm technology in chips increases, so does the royalty rate. With around 35% of Arm's total royalty revenue coming from smartphones, we have benefited from recovery in the smartphone market. But with 65% coming from markets beyond mobile, we are seeing more revenue growth from share gains and market share growth outside of mobile. Additionally, we are expecting another strong quarter for licensing with revenue up sequentially to near record levels. As with recent quarters, we expect to sign multiple new ATA deals in Q4, and demand for our latest technology remains high as customers need access to AI-capable CPUs and related technology such as our Compute Subsystems. Turning to expenses. We expect non-GAAP OpEx of approximately $490 million in Q4 and $1.7 billion for the full year. On a like-for-like basis, our full year guidance has increased by $10 million, driven by slightly higher spending in R&D. As detailed in the guidance section of our shareholder letter, to increase transparency and improve the comparability of our results, beginning in Q4, the presentation of our non-GAAP measures will be modified to exclude employer taxes related to equity classified awards. These taxes depend on our stock price at the time of vesting and, as a result, fluctuate independently of the operating performance of our business. The impact of this change has been factored into today's non-GAAP Q4 and full year guidance for operating expenses and fully diluted EPS. On an EPS basis, revenue strength will flow through to profit, driving Q4 non-GAAP fully diluted EPS up to between $0.28 and $0.32 and full year non-GAAP fully diluted EPS to between $1.20 and $1.24. In summary, we had an outstanding Q3 and expect our momentum to accelerate through Q4 and beyond. With that, I will now turn it back over to the operator to kick off the Q&A portion of the call.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Harlan Sur of JPMorgan. Your question, please, Harlan.
Harlan Sur, Analyst
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon and congratulations on the strong results, guidance and, of course, execution. December quarter, as you guys mentioned, right, second consecutive quarter of strong licensing, second consecutive quarter of book-to-bill greater than 1, strong ACV. It sounds like many of your customers across all of your end markets are focusing on accelerated compute and AI and the requirements for more compute capability. And that's obviously being reflected in the strong licensing performance. How much of the expansion on recent licensing deals has been more about adding your AI specific IP, right? Like, your Ethos NPU or taking advantage of some of your Helium and Neon vector extensions for AI workloads or Compute Subsystems adoption versus just buying up the stack on more powerful cores? And then more importantly, do you guys see the strong licensing momentum continuing into fiscal '25?
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. Hi, Harlan and thank you for the kind words. I'll take the first part of your question and then let Jason comment on the second half. One of the new products that we released from a licensing standpoint is something we call Arm Total Access, which Jason referred to as ATA. That gives customers access to a broad set of Arm technology including our most advanced CPUs and NPUs. What we are seeing is exactly what you described; demand for incorporating CPUs with anything that helps with AI acceleration such as vector extensions. Additionally, the ATAs give customers access to NPUs, which they can also use for an off-load. What we are seeing anecdotally relative to when we engage customers is that the need for more compute, the need to be able to handle, what I would call, unknown ability relative to these large language models that either run on an edge device or in a hybrid way is fundamentally driving a need for more compute than they had before. They are looking to upgrade to give themselves flexibility on the design and also to maximize their ability to deliver the most efficient product, whether that's lots of different cores or a smaller set of devices that may or may not include an NPU. So in summary, yes, your question is accurate relative to the conclusion that AI demand is driving a need for a lot of different products. I'll let Jason kind of comment on the longer-term trend that we see.
Jason Child, CFO
Yeah. Harlan, I would say on the looking forward, so obviously, I only gave guidance for Q4. But going beyond that, when you unpack licensing versus royalty, because of the fact that we're largely almost entirely under contract for next year on royalties, we feel good about those trends. It's the license piece that's a little harder to forecast. If I look at last quarter and this quarter, we've definitely had some upside from AI and selling additional licenses that were just not in our plan and not anticipated. I think we’re going to need to work through this quarter to find out how much of that upside continues and that trend flows into next year because we’ve seen this demand has been coming in with shorter sales cycles than we had seen typically before. So I’d say to stay tuned, and in 90 days, we’ll give you a better view.
Harlan Sur, Analyst
No helpful. Thank you very much.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gary Mobley of Wells Fargo. Your question, please. Gary?
Gary Mobley, Analyst
Hi, guys. Thanks very much for taking my question. Let me extend my congratulations to the entire Arm team for the strong results. Can't help but notice the strength in business from Arm China. Maybe if you can speak to what drove that strong result out of Arm China? And besides Arm China, were there any other greater than 10% customers in the quarter?
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. I would say broadly speaking, we are seeing increased market share gains for our products across the board, particularly around automotive and infrastructure/data center. Inside China, those are very good growth markets. One of the things we continue to comment on relative to the China market is that the China ecosystem tends to follow the global ecosystem. As we see the share gains across different aspects of the market, we're seeing that consistent and holding true relative to China. Jason, do you want to take the other part of that?
Jason Child, CFO
Yeah. Just on the numbers to make sure it's clear. So when we announce related parties, I think we're about 30% of growth. Arm China is the largest portion of it. However, there are others. So Arm China was about 25% of total revenue, just slightly up from the 20% from a quarter ago.
Gary Mobley, Analyst
That's helpful. The gains in the royalty rate per unit, if I can add a follow-on, certainly are accelerating. Is that all driven by Armv9? And should we continue to expect that upward inflection in the royalty rate per unit?
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. I think that's the right way to think about it. As mentioned, Armv9 was 10% of our royalty revenue last quarter, now 15%. We see that accelerating. The other thing we are seeing is that the mixes of devices that might have a mix of v8 and v9 cores are increasingly moving to more v9 cores. The reason for that is back to the AI comment, the compute needs of the end applications continue to increase. Customers are looking to put more and more technology into their devices, perhaps even more than they originally planned for when they had licensed the technology. So it’s a compounding effect of growth. We see royalty growth happening from the v8 to v9 transition and more Arm technology being used in the same devices. It’s a compounding effect that helps us with growth.
Gary Mobley, Analyst
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Thomas O'Malley of Barclays. Your question, please. Thomas?
Thomas O'Malley, Analyst
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the nice results. I just want to add a question to the v9 pile here. You guys are talking about traction in AI, smartphones, infrastructure. You're saying that, that percentage as a percentage of total revenue grows into the next fiscal year. Where are you seeing the most of that traction? You called out AI a couple of times here early in the call. But is that coming more from the smartphone side or the AI side? And just maybe talk about the cadence of where you see that penetration rate growing as you get into the next fiscal year. Thank you.
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. So thanks for the question. So a couple of ways to think about it. There's definitely growth coming from the data center side. Proof points such as NVIDIA's Grace Hopper, the Microsoft Cobalt design, and the work that AWS has been doing in Graviton. We are seeing more and more AI demands in the data center, whether that's around training or inference. The Arm solution in the data center is extremely good in terms of performance per watt and the constraints that exist on today's data center in terms of running AI workloads creates a huge demand for power, which is a great tailwind for Arm. If we move to the edge devices such as smartphones, we've seen, and I think the recent launches, as I mentioned, with Gemini Nano and the Galaxy S24, increased AI workloads being pushed to the phone. From a design standpoint, we are seeing more and more compute technology being pushed into those phones such that they are AI capable and AI ready because this field is moving very quickly. A year from now, it’s uncertain what type of AI applications might run on a smartphone. The shift toward more high-performance capable technology is essential to capturing the wave of AI opportunities. So that has accelerated the v9 adoption, both from a standpoint of more devices using it and more devices using more of it. To your question, where is it coming from? It's coming from everywhere: certainly the data center, certainly from the edge devices, and we think over time, even AIPCs. So it’s a huge growth vector.
Thomas O'Malley, Analyst
Super helpful. And then if I could just ask a follow-up as well. If you look at the seasonality of the close year, you obviously saw really strong results in both the December and the March quarter. Obviously, you’re not perfect with units. But if you look at June and the smartphone ecosystem, you’re kind of seeing a little bit of a pause in the Android ecosystem and some cautious data points from the supply chain in general. Could you talk about what you expect in terms of seasonality to start your fiscal year? Any tidbits there would be helpful. I know you’re not guiding June, but any way to help think about how we begin the next fiscal year would be helpful. Thank you.
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. I’m not going to comment too far forward on the seasonality component of what we’re doing. But what I would emphasize is that we’re a bit of a different company relative to how you think about other companies in terms of their specific exposure to a market. We are involved in just about every single end market. Every single end market is moving from v8 to v9, which, as I said, has effectively doubled the royalty rates. Just about every one of these markets is putting more compute into their devices. I think it's worth noting that while some might try to match units to numbers, we operate on a different plane because of our broad adoption. As I mentioned at the start of the call, the pervasiveness of the architecture is driving a different set of growth vectors.
Thomas O'Malley, Analyst
Thank you very much, guys.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya of Bank of America Securities. Your line is open, Vivek.
Vivek Arya, Analyst
Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to clarify, Rene, is the 10% to 15% related to the number of customers, the number of chips, or the revenue from those sales? I believe the shareholder letter qualifies v9 at 15% of royalty revenue. A broader question is to understand how many of your smartphone units are currently using v9 compared to those that used v9 in the last quarter. Would that be a better way to track v9 adoption?
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. So let me try to answer your question. First off, the percentage when we say 10% and 15%, that’s a percentage of our overall royalty revenue, that’s the way to think about that. When you think about the number of units moving from v8 to v9, I don't think we have anything specific that I can give you on this call. But what I can tell you is, as an example or an anecdote, is that v9 is being used extensively in almost exclusively now in all the premium smartphones. These premium smartphones, such as the Galaxy S24, are actually part of the segments that are seeing better growth than their counterparts. Since virtually all premium smartphones have now moved to v9 and as I mentioned before, people are trying to put as much v9 technology in their smartphones to capture the AI wave, this provides an insight into where the growth comes from. What we tend to see with the smartphone market is typically a waterfall over time, where what was in the premium unit finds its way into the high end then into the midrange. But from a premium smartphone perspective, we are seeing a lot of v9 in use and many premium smartphones being sold.
Vivek Arya, Analyst
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mehdi Hosseini of SIG. Your question, please. Mehdi?
Mehdi Hosseini, Analyst
Yes. Thanks for taking my question. Just actually as a follow-up, is there any way you could elaborate on the mix of v9 by end market like a smartphone versus cloud compute? And I have a follow-up.
Rene Haas, CEO
I'll attempt to answer that; as I said, premium smartphones are now almost exclusively v9. Virtually every high end data center chip is v9. When you look at Grace Hopper, when you look at Graviton, when you look at Microsoft Cobalt, they are all based on v9 designs.
Jason Child, CFO
The only thing I would add regarding royalty revenue and the chips that have been deployed in the market is that we are predominantly focused on smartphones with v9 due to its annual refresh cycle. I believe this segment is currently leading. Over time, I expect the other lines of business to catch up, but for now, the emphasis is definitely more on smartphones, as Rene mentioned regarding the premium mix.
Mehdi Hosseini, Analyst
Thank you. My follow-up question is about market share. At the end of FY '23, your cloud market share was around 10%, and networking was 26%. Can you provide any insights on how those market shares are evolving as you approach the end of FY '24?
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah, not today. We're not prepared to give that. When we give the updates for next year or the next quarter, we can do that. But I can say we’re very pleased about the direction of travel, and AI has only helped that grow faster.
Mehdi Hosseini, Analyst
Got it. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vijay Rakesh of Mizuho. Your question please, Vijay.
Vijay Rakesh, Analyst
Yeah. Hi. Congrats again on a great quarter. Just a quick question. On the cloud compute side, if you could give us some way of how to look at what do you think will be the growth in 2024, given you have some pretty market customers with GH20 and Graviton and Cobalt 100 now? And I have a follow-up.
Rene Haas, CEO
Sorry, I didn't catch it quite. You're asking about projected growth for next year in cloud?
Vijay Rakesh, Analyst
For calendar 2024, what growth do you anticipate in cloud computing, considering you have some significant market customers now?
Jason Child, CFO
As Rene just mentioned, regarding the last question, we will provide our market share update specifically on Compute, which for us is primarily cloud infrastructure. We’ll share our expectations for its progression next year. So please give us 90 days.
Vijay Rakesh, Analyst
Got it. On the mobile side, you noted strong traction with v9. I'm curious about the current penetration rate of v9 among premium phones and what the projections are for the year. How do you plan to address this later?
Rene Haas, CEO
Is your question what percentage of smartphones are v9?
Vijay Rakesh, Analyst
Yeah.
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. Most of the premium, if not all, smartphones have moved to v9, and the rest of the segments have been slower to adopt. The premium segment draws a very large mixture of lots of cores and many royalty-rich cores. It tends to skew the numbers relative to overall units. We expect v9 to penetrate broadly in the next three to four years.
Ian Thornton, Head of Investor Relations
If you go back to how v8 took over from v7, it took about three years to get from here to about 80%, 90% penetrated.
Vijay Rakesh, Analyst
Got it. Thanks.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ross Seymore of Deutsche Bank. Your question, please, Ross.
Ross Seymore, Analyst
Hi, guys. Thanks for letting me ask the question. Congrats on the strong results and guide. I wanted to go back to the Arm China conversation. So a clarification and the main question. The clarification was that 25% that I think, Jason, you mentioned, was that of total revenues or just of royalties? And then the main question is, could you just help us break down a little bit how that’s so strong, whether it’s total revenues or just royalties, that was a significant driver of growth. Depending upon the answer to the clarification, it could have been more than all of the sequential growth. I just wanted to get my arms around what was really driving the growth and how much of it came from in Arm China.
Jason Child, CFO
Yeah. China was 25% of total revenues in Q3 and that's up from 20% in Q2.
Ross Seymore, Analyst
And then what was driving that? Because again, by that math, it seems like it was up, I don't know, 30% and everything else kind of went down a little bit sequentially. Was that just the China handset market coming back to life? Was it more good news beyond that? Just any color you could give on what drove that China growth that was so impressive.
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. We don’t break down the individual customers. But as I said, the China ecosystem tends to follow the rest of the world. So when we talk about growth in data centers, growth in automotive, and certainly recovering in the smartphone market, that all helps.
Ross Seymore, Analyst
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Charles Shi of Needham & Company. Please go ahead. Charles?
Charles Shi, Analyst
Great. Thanks. I add my congratulations to our management team on the very strong results, very impressive. I do want to dig into a little bit more on the China and the related party side of the revenue, because when I look at your historical numbers, your Arm China contribution tracks almost identically to the related party transactions. There seems to be a little bit of a gap, seems to be expanding a little bit over the last quarter. And maybe related to that, you had very strong bookings in the last quarter, and this quarter the booking actually comes down a little bit, but the licensing revenue actually was stronger than you expected. Was that the result of some of the earlier commencement of the licensing contracts that you probably signed a little bit earlier in the year, maybe in the prior quarter? And is that more of a timing that kind of surprised you to the upside? Thanks.
Jason Child, CFO
Yeah. So first on the related parties. So yes, typically, China has been most all of it. We did have an additional license deal that was roughly 5% of total revenue, the difference between Arm China and the rest – that deal did come through this quarter. That’s not something that’s been continuous but was a deal that came in this last quarter. In terms of the makeup of license revenue, we typically run somewhere around 40% to 50% of our license revenue from backlog, so deals previously signed but related to technology milestones that are delivered within the quarter. The remainder are new deals signed in the quarter. With the increased focus in AI, there is a lot of investment and building designs in AI, and so there are some shorter cycle deals that have come up, which is a little different from what we've seen in the past. That’s the primary reason why we need to spend a little more time this quarter to gauge how much of that momentum will continue next year. Does that answer your question?
Charles Shi, Analyst
Yes. Thanks. If I may add that the China piece, your IP peers seem to be a little more cautious about what's going to happen, I mean, this year and actually kind of cautious you started that late last year, but your China revenue is still going very strong. How do we reconcile the differences here? I mean, this is my last question. Thank you so much.
Jason Child, CFO
Well, I wouldn't say that we're less cautious. I think our numbers have been strong. From a forecast perspective, we've been forecasting that China likely goes down into the teens as a percentage of total revenue. This last quarter and the quarter before, we've just seen stronger recovery than we had previously expected. That’s been certainly a nice positive surprise. In terms of going forward, we feel good about the progress we expect to deliver this quarter. We’ll let you know if we think that progress is going to continue into next year.
Charles Shi, Analyst
Appreciate the color. Thanks.
Jason Child, CFO
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Ramsay of TD Cowen. Your question, please. Matt?
Matthew Ramsay, Analyst
Thank you very much, guys. Good afternoon. I wanted to go back to the Armv9 conversation on a couple of points. I noticed that this is the first time, and maybe I'm just not up-to-date, but I think this is the first time you explicitly put in the shareholder letter and in writing that you were at least doubling royalty rates from v8 to v9. I wanted to ask about that in a broader sense. Is that sort of across the board, across end markets and also across customers that are traditionally processor licensees as well as those that are typically architectural licensees? Is that a blanket statement across the board? And the reason I ask is if you recall lots of conversations around the IPO timeframe, there were aggressive ramps of royalty rates across your mobile business. We were trying to figure out whether the v8 penetration to v9 would drive those kinds of expansion in results or if you would need substantial contributions from system licenses and the like to get those results. Any context there about the applicability and breadth of that comment on doubling royalty rates on v9 would be really helpful. Thanks, guys.
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. So I'll attempt to answer that and let Jason chime in if needed. Yes, you're correct. This is the first time we've explicitly stated that, although we only have done two shareholder letters, so we don't have a significant installed base to refer to. We wanted to provide clarity because we've received questions about how to think about transitioning from v8 to v9. The statement regarding double the royalty rate for v9 over the equivalent v8 is a rough guidepost, and in some cases, it’s significantly more. The Neoverse royalty rates and automotive royalty rates have unique tables. Some of the high-performance CPUs sold into the client section have very significant lifted rates over version 8. The double rate is a good rule of thumb for like-for-like comparison, but in some cases, it's even better than that. We wanted to provide clarity since people may struggle to work out how we reached here. So, Jason, I don't know if you want to add anything.
Jason Child, CFO
No. I think to Rene's earlier point, I understand we're a little bit hard to model because we don’t really track against other companies. We’re getting paid royalties on roughly 8 billion chips a quarter, and the slightest bit of mix to more premium handsets or more v9 versus v8 tends to be a sensitive variable. The growth from last quarter to this quarter and what we're expecting from this quarter to next quarter demonstrates that unit growth is very small. It's almost solely due to rate growth increases. As we said back at IPO, we're almost 100% contracted for next year. We wanted to provide this v8 to v9 ratio as a means to help you model the progress. I hope it's helpful.
Rene Haas, CEO
One thing we were confident about when we began the transition from v8 to v9 was the anticipation of increased rates and an improved royalty picture compared to the past. A contributing factor is that the number of v9 cores or the proportion of v9 cores has exceeded our expectations, as people are deploying more CPUs than initially planned or choosing a higher mix of v9 over v8. This positive trend strengthens our forward momentum.
Matthew Ramsay, Analyst
No, that’s super helpful, guys. Just a quick clarification. Any comment on whether the base rates may differ and that different customers have various contracts, but does that commentary still generally apply to your architectural licensees as well?
Jason Child, CFO
Yes, it is.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Gardiner of Citi. Your question, please, Andrew?
Andrew Gardiner, Analyst
Thank you for taking my question. I have one regarding licensing. You mentioned the strong performance in the quarter and expressed surprise at the quicker sales cycle for some licenses. However, you also noted in the shareholder letter that three out of the five ATA licensees upgraded from the Arm Flexible Access program, which was the first time that occurred. Were you surprised by this, or were these customers particularly large for an AFA, making upgrades natural? Should we expect this to continue positively surprising us? Is there a segment of that group that is likely to upgrade from AFA to ATA, leading to increased license revenue?
Rene Haas, CEO
Yeah. Thank you for the question. We didn’t bring it up in our comments. We had a lot of good information to cover this quarter, and I was trying to keep it concise. The AFA transition to ATA is a great trend for us. When we designed the program a number of years ago, that was absolutely the intent, that customers starting with AFA would ultimately migrate to a total access license. The main drivers are that many of the AFA customers are early-stage companies. They may have an early exit or get acquired. As they grow and develop, we expect them to embrace Arm technology in broader terms. So I wouldn't call it a surprise but rather an expected outcome that we are pleased to see. Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference back to Rene Haas for closing remarks. Sir?
Rene Haas, CEO
Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for the kind words on the quarter and a good set of questions that we had. We're thrilled about Q3, and we're very, very excited about Q4. I think what you're seeing coming to life are all the strategies that we've been working hard on over the last number of years, investment in the v9 technology, diversification of our business into data center, automotive and, of course, IoT. Then now, what I think is the most profound opportunity in our lifetimes, which is around AI. Regarding AI, particularly when you think about artificial general intelligence, that will drive the need for more compute in a way that we've never seen before. As good as the last couple of quarters were, we're just at the beginning. I could not be more excited about the growth that we have going forward, and thank you for all your time and questions.
Operator, Operator
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.