Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the third quarter 2026 Datadog earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will open up for questions. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I will now hand it over to our first speaker, AJ Ljubich, Senior Vice President, Strategic Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Victor. Good morning, and thank you for joining us to review Datadog's third quarter 2026 financial results, which we announced in our press release issued this morning. Joining me on the call today are Olivier Pomel, Datadog's Co-Founder and CEO, and David Obstler, Datadog's CFO. First, I would like to thank Yuka Broderick for her excellent work leading our IR function over the last five and a half years as she takes on a new role within Datadog. I am excited to step back into the IR function after having worked with many of you through the company's 2019 IPO. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to our future financial performance, our outlook for the fourth quarter and for the fiscal year of 2026, and related notes and assumptions, our product capabilities, and our ability to capitalize on market opportunities.
The words anticipate, believe, continue, estimate, expect, intend, will, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements or similar indications of future expectations. These statements reflect our views as of today and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. Additional information will be made available in our upcoming Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2026, and other filings with the SEC. This information is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website, along with a replay of this call. We will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled for the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings release, which are available at investors.datadoghq.com.
With that, I would like to turn the call over to Olivier.
Thanks, AJ, and thank you all for joining us today to go over our Q3 results. Let me begin with this quarter's business drivers. I am pleased to say that we executed a strong Q3. We saw strength across our business, including across our product lines and across our diverse customer base. Revenue growth from our non-AI customers accelerated for the fifth straight quarter and was in the high 20% year-over-year, up about 1 percentage point from last quarter and up from about 20% in the year-ago quarter. Additionally, our AI customer cohort remains a strong growth driver. This cohort continued to grow and diversify, both in the number of customers we serve and in the scale of those customers.
Overall, we continue to see healthy demand as customers from the most tech-forward startups to the largest enterprises in the world are building with AI and with modern technologies, which we believe is fueling expanded adoption of the cloud and of the Datadog platform. Regarding our Q3 financial performance and key metrics, revenue was $1.2 billion, an increase of 35% year-over-year and above the high end of our guidance range. We ended Q3 with about 33,500 customers, up from about 32,000 a year ago. We also ended with about 4,860 customers with an ARR of $100,000 or more, up from about 4,060 a year ago. These customers generated about 91% of our ARR. We generated free cash flow of $251 million, with a free cash flow margin of 21%. Turning to product adoption, our platform strategy continues to resonate in the market.
61% of our customers now use four or more products, up from 54% a year ago. 41% of our customers use six or more products, up from 31% a year ago. 16% of our customers use 10 or more products, up from 8% a year ago. We are landing more customers and delivering value across more products through our unified platform. One milestone we are very proud of, our Infrastructure Monitoring suite of products now exceeds $2 billion in ARR, growing in the mid-30% year-over-year. Infrastructure Monitoring was the first product we brought to market more than 10 years ago. Today, our customers rely on Datadog for visibility across their environments, including cloud infrastructure, on-prem servers, containers, serverless applications, and GPU fleets. While we are thrilled to reach this milestone, we still feel that we are just getting started.
According to industry analysts, we are the market share leader in global observability, but with a percentage market share still in the teens. Moving on to R&D. As AI changes how our customers build and run software, we have been investing and executing on two fronts: AI for Datadog and Datadog for AI. First, AI for Datadog. These are AI products and capabilities that make the Datadog platform more useful and increasingly automated for our customers. First off, our flagship agent, Bits AI, is off to a very strong start. Since we launched Bits, it has become the fastest adopted product in our history. In October, Bits Testing became generally available. With a single click, it discovers the critical user flows in an application and generates tests to cover them. Meanwhile, our AI research team is hard at work pushing the boundaries of what Bits and our platform can do.
Last month, we introduced Scout, our own reasoning model specifically optimized for SRE tasks. Scout was built using our in-house distributed reinforcement learning infrastructure and now powers our Bits Investigation. This is exciting for two reasons. First, it performs on par or even better than frontier models on alert investigations at a fraction of the inference cost. This is valuable as it allows Bits to investigate many more alerts, start earlier, and go deeper on incidents as an always-on first responder for our customers. Second, this is also exciting as a demonstration of what we can achieve when we train models with our own production data, critical user workflows, and internal tooling. Scout is only the beginning. With the Adaptive ML team, which joined us in June, we are broadly accelerating our work on reinforcement learning and model post-training.
Over time, we expect our research efforts to drive a step change in capabilities across our platform and move us closer to our goal of autonomous operations. Moving on next to Datadog for AI. These are the products that deliver end-to-end observability and security across the new AI stack. As AI moves from experimentation into production, customers today need to answer three key questions. How is it performing? Is it secure? What's the ROI, or is it worth the spend? Because AI doesn't run in isolation, they want these answers on the same platform as the rest of their tech stack. On performance, we cover the whole AI stack, from compute all the way to agents. GPU Monitoring now goes beyond hardware reliability, with new capabilities that help customers maximize fleet utilization, increase training throughput, and serve inference at a lower cost per request.
The number of GPU devices monitored is up by a factor of eight so far this year, and some of our Frontier Lab customers are working with us as design partners on these capabilities. Going up the stack, Agent Observability helps teams monitor and evaluate their agents in production, including the quality of their responses, latency, and token usage. The number of spans sent to Agent Observability is now up by a factor of nine this year. We've also made Agent Observability available in the Anthropic Marketplace, and we're a launch partner to OpenAI's new enterprise marketplace as well. So now, customers can buy our product directly through the Frontier Labs they already work with.
On the security side, our AI Guard product discovers the custom agents running across an organization and protects them at runtime against prompt injection and data exfiltration, drawing on the same real-time data we collect to observe them. On the cost side, companies everywhere are grappling with a very fast growth in token and AI spend. Beyond the three major clouds, AI providers are now the largest category of spend our customers monitor in Datadog Cloud Cost Management, or CCM. Now, with AI costs in CCM, customers can see which teams, models, and agents drive their AI spend, can govern that spend with budgets, forecasts, and anomaly alerts. More than a third of our CCM customers now track AI costs. The number of customers doing so is up more than 11 x.
Moving up the stack again, our Agent Console adds to our CCM data and shows exactly which agents are actually used, by whom, for what task, at what cost, and most importantly, with what outcomes. As we continue to innovate across AI for Datadog and Datadog for AI, independent research is taking note. Forrester named Datadog a Leader in its 2026 Forrester Wave for AIOps platforms. Gartner's August 2026 AI Vendor Race report called Datadog the company to beat for observability platform. We believe this validates our leadership in observability, as well as our ability to help customers manage complexity in the age of AI. Let's move on to sales and marketing and look at a few of the deals our go-to-market teams have closed in what has been a very strong quarter.
First, we signed a seven-figure annualized expansion with a leading software company, more than doubling their annual commitment. This customer is moving AI agents into production and will replace a standalone commercial tool with Datadog Agent Observability to monitor their costs and quality. By using Flex Logs, they can gather and correlate larger log volumes at a lower cost. In total, they will consolidate three tools onto Datadog and grow to 20 Datadog products, including On-Call and Bits AI. Next, we landed a five-year, seven-figure annualized deal with a U.S. federal defense agency. This customer runs thousands of cloud accounts across hundreds of mission owners, and as they've modernized, their manual tooling left them with fragmented visibility and security blind spots. They chose Datadog as their enterprise observability and security platform, and will start with nine products, including Infrastructure Monitoring and Cloud Security.
I want to congratulate our public sector team on this milestone win, which was a direct result of our investment in government and the FedRAMP High certification we secured earlier in the year. We're actively expanding our government platform to support workloads up to Impact Level 5, or IL5, the highest level of accreditation for unclassified data, which is part of our long-term investment in the U.S. public sector. Next, we landed a seven-figure annualized deal with a leading home healthcare software company. As this customer has grown, fragmented tools have slowed incident response and hurt customer experience. They will consolidate four tools into Datadog, replacing their legacy log and security vendor with FlexLogs and Cloud SIEM, and relying on our Sensitive Data Scanner to help them stay HIPAA compliant. This customer will start with nine Datadog products, including Incident Management and Bits AI for faster resolution.
Next, we signed a seven-figure annualized expansion with a leading online entertainment company. This customer is seeing a surge in traffic with their peak season and is scaling effectively with Datadog. Their own AI agents already use our MCP Server, and today, they are also adding Bits AI. This customer will grow to 23 Datadog products, including Agent Observability and Cloud Cost Management. Next, we landed seven-figure annualized deals with two of Japan's most important banks. As they modernize their core financial systems, both banks are standardizing on Datadog for unified visibility across cloud and on-prem environments. Both customers are adopting the full Datadog platform, including all three pillars: digital experience, security, software delivery, service management, and Bits AI, as they move towards AI-driven operations. Next, we landed a six-figure annualized deal with a top European AI lab.
This customer's developers were losing valuable time to slow builds and flaky tests, which delayed releases in a highly competitive market. They chose Datadog's CI Visibility and Test Optimization, replacing a commercial tool and freeing their own engineers to focus on shipping product. Their engineers also use Bits AI to quickly build monitors and custom analytics. Next, we signed a seven-figure annualized expansion for an eight-figure annualized deal with a leading AI coding company. This customer is growing rapidly and renewed early to keep pace with their expanding footprint. With this expansion, they will adopt Flex Logs and our new Infinite Cardinality Metrics to scale costs effectively with volume. They are also one of the largest users of our MCP Server. This customer will grow to 13 Datadog products.
Finally, we signed an eight-figure annualized expansion with the AI division of one of the world's largest technology companies, which nearly tripled their annual commitment. Just two quarters after we landed them, they are scaling Datadog across a large number of AI training workloads. They are also adopting APM and Bits AI to further reduce engineering friction. Alongside these wins, on the other side of the customer spectrum, we are leaning into the large number of new AI-native companies we see create every day by investing in our Datadog for Startups program. We are broadening its reach to a larger number of startups that are early on in their life cycle and offering deeper engineering collaboration with the ones that are seeing explosive growth. This is a truly exciting time to partner with startups.
Now, before I turn it over to David for a financial review, I would like to say a few words on the longer-term outlook. There is no change to our overall view that digital transformation and cloud migration are long-term growth drivers for our business. AI is another large growth driver for us today, as AI workloads move into production to drive more cloud consumption and more usage of the Datadog platform. We see that today across our business. All 15 of the top 15 AI leaders are our customers. More broadly, we now serve over 850 AI customers, up from about 750 last quarter. Across our broader customer base, we also see AI activity growing substantially.
About a third of our customers now use one or more of our AI products, including three-quarters of our $100,000 plus customers, with many of these customers still just getting started with these products, leaving a large opportunity for future expansion. We continue to see rapid growth in agentic activity, with the number of MCP tool calls up by a factor of 50 so far this year. We are tremendously excited about where this is going. As AI writes and runs more of our customers' software, they are shipping more code faster across a growing mix of models, agents, and infrastructure. Of course, this generates complexity that is very quickly outpacing what even the best engineering teams can track on their own. That is exactly the problem we are investing to solve. AI for Datadog takes on more of that work for them.
Datadog for AI helps them run their AI with confidence. Our AI research turns their data into models that will deliver more autonomy over time. Because of that, now more than ever, we feel ideally positioned to help customers of every size and every industry, as well as every type of user, whether humans or AI agents, so they can transform, innovate, and drive value through AI and cloud adoption. With that, I will turn it over to our CFO. David?
Thanks, Olivier, and good morning to everybody. Our Q3 revenue was $1.197 billion, up 35% year over year. We continued to see robust usage growth from existing customers, as well as a strong ramp in our new customers. Revenue growth accelerated within our broad base of customers, excluding AI customers, to the high 20s percent year over year, up about one percentage point from last quarter, and up from about 20% in the year-ago quarter. We saw robust growth with broad-based strength across customer segments, spending bands, and industries. Excluding our largest customer, revenue growth accelerated again. As we communicated in August, our largest customer reduced their usage in the third quarter, while their usage remained above their minimum commitment. Meanwhile, our AI customers' growth continues to significantly outpace the rest of the business.
This over 850-strong group continues to diversify and grow, including 39 customers spending more than $1 million annually with us. We continue to land larger and grow faster with new logos, contributing more to revenue growth. The portion of our year-over-year revenue growth that relates to new customers was about 30% in Q3, up from 25% in the year-ago quarter. Now regarding our retention metrics. Our trailing 12-month net revenue retention percentage was in the low 120s percent, similar to last quarter, and churn remains low, with gross revenue retention stable in the mid to high 90s. We believe this metric highlights the mission-critical nature of our platform for our customers. Now moving on to our financial results. Billings in the quarter were $1.16 billion, up 30% year over year. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, was $3.85 billion, up 38% year over year.
Current RPO grew in the mid-30s percent year over year. RPO duration increased slightly year over year. As a reminder, we continue to believe revenue is a better indication of our business trends than billings or RPO. Let's review some of the key income statement results. Unless otherwise noted, all metrics are non-GAAP. We have provided a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financials in our earnings release. For Q3, our gross profit was $972 million, and the gross margin was 81.2%. This compares to a gross margin of 79.6% last quarter and 81.2% in the year-ago quarter. Q3 OPEX grew 25% year over year, versus 26% last quarter and 32% in the year-ago quarter. Q3 operating income was $334 million, or 28% operating margin, compared to 23% last quarter and 23% in the year-ago quarter. Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statements.
We ended the quarter with $5.2 billion in cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Cash flow from operations was $290 million in the quarter. After taking into consideration capital expenditures and capitalized software, free cash flow was $251 million, with a free cash flow margin of 21%. Quarterly, the timing of collections and payments vary, and on a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow margin was 26%. Now for our outlook for the fourth quarter and for fiscal year 2026. First, our guidance philosophy overall remains unchanged. As a reminder, we base our guidance on trends observed in recent months and apply conservatism on these growth trends. Regarding our largest customer, our Q4 guidance contemplates their revenue at their minimum commitment.
Now, for the fourth quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of $1.19 billion-$1.2 billion, which represents a 25%-26% year-over-year growth. Excluding our largest customer, Q4 revenue growth implied in our guidance is in the low to mid-30s percent range. Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $280 million-$290 million, which implies an operating margin of 24%. The fourth quarter includes large marketing investments, including AWS re:Invent. Our non-GAAP net income per share is expected to be in the $0.69-$0.71 per share range, based on approximately 379 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. For the fiscal year 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $4.515 billion-$4.525 billion, which represents approximately 32% year-over-year growth.
Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $1.095 billion-$1.105 billion, which implies an operating margin of 24%. Finally, non-GAAP net income per share is expected to be in the range of $2.73-$2.75 per share, based on approximately 375 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. Now, some additional notes on our guidance. We expect net interest and other income for the fiscal year 2026 to be approximately $200 million. We expect cash taxes to be about $30 million-$40 million, and we continue to apply a 21% non-GAAP tax rate for 2026 and going forward. Finally, we expect capital expenditures and capitalized software together to be in the 3%-4% of revenue range in fiscal year 2026. To summarize, we are pleased with our execution in Q3, which combines strong growth with strong profitability.
We continue to invest to capture our long-term opportunity in the cloud and in AI. I want to thank Datadogs worldwide for their efforts. Now with that, we will open the call for questions. Operator, let's begin the Q&A.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. One moment for our first question. Our first question will come from the line of Sanjit Singh from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Yeah, thank you for taking the questions and congrats on the strong results on Q3. David, I want to start with the Q4 guide. If we rewind back 90 days ago, has anything changed with respect to your underlying assumptions between the different cohorts, so between the core business and the sort of largest customers versus 90 days ago? Or is this outlook just sort of a reflection of that sort of minimum commitment methodology that you're applying in Q4? Just kind of in the sense of has anything changed with respect to—
Yeah.
—the outlook you provided?
There are a couple, yeah, thank you, Sanjit. There are a couple things to talk about. First of all, I think we said versus our largest customer that they renewed and they were spending above the minimum commit, and that happened in Q3. We said that in our guidance, we were going to only include the minimum commit despite the fact that in Q3, they were spending above the minimum commit. As we talked about, we've accelerated in Q3, excluding the largest customer. So, I would say the only thing that has changed was in sort of Q3, we did some renewals extensions with some large and large AI customers, where as normal, we essentially extend and increase the commit, but do better pricing for that. And that happened in a number of large customers.
It's our normal behavior, and that's really the only thing that changed since our last communication. Oli, do you want to add anything?
Yeah, there's a few we discussed on the call. I could bring up a few of those large customers where we saw renewals way earlier than we thought we would. There's another one that happened in October that we're not discussing. These are all good news, but they do create headwind into the short term into the revenue, and that's one change from last quarter. Other than that, everything else played out pretty much the way we were expecting, with some happy surprises, including, in particular, the continued acceleration of the non-AI customer, which has been very good as well.
Understood. If we think about the ex-AI native customer growth, that's been on an accelerating trend for several quarters now. As we think about this core non-AI native business, you obviously have a lot of tailwinds on the AI portfolio. It seems like the 100K customer quarters is definitely more of the AI product. Do you feel that that can continue to drive or sort of sustain the trajectory? Or are we, after multiple quarters of acceleration, do you sort of see a leveling off in that ex-AI native cohort? Thank you.
I mean, look, in the Q3 mark, all of these customers are adopting AI, and they're consuming more cloud, and they're building more software, and they're changing the way they work. So we expect a long period of growth for these customers. Now, what the overall growth rate is, does it keep going up a lot? Does it stay stable? It's a very high growth rate already, and we feel pretty good about it. It's hard to say where it's going to go, but we're very confident in the broader trend that is underpinning that.
All right, thank you. One moment for our next question. Next question will come from the line of Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. David, I want to stay on this point on the AI-native cohort, because I think you've been very transparent in how you talk about your largest customers versus the rest of the cohort. My question for you is, you have these funky sequentials because you have had this incredible growth rate in this cohort over the last 12 months, and now you've got this renewal dynamic with your largest customer. You're also talking about the renewal dynamics on the early renewals. My question for you is, what can you tell us about how to think about modeling the sequentials in this business? Is it that we get through the next, call it, two quarters, and then we're back to steady state?
Is it that maybe we see another step function down every year in the sequential because you have this earlier renewal dynamic, which again, is a really good place to be because you're getting these really large deals that the only way you get better pricing is because the dollar volume is going up. So maybe just to put some takes to how we think about the sequentials for the AI-native cohort and when we'll be back to something that looks like normal, which I get is a tricky definition of the word normal anyway.
Yeah. Good question. In terms of the largest customer, I think as we said, the customer renewed. We decided to put only the commitment, the minimum commitment. The customer in Q3 spent substantially above the minimum commitment. One thing that is very important in the sequentials is what happens there. We don't control that. The customer can't go below the minimum commitment, but can be various degrees above the minimum commitment. That is one factor that we. Essentially, one thing that will create less of a sequential guidance or actual would be that that number stabilizes and isn't running above the minimum commitment. That's one.
I would say, and I'll broaden it. I mean—
Yeah.
The point here is, there's one part that is very usual, which is that we have all these customers that are spending and they're growing and they're renewing, and then when they renew, they get a better deal, and they also adjust their traffic over time with an underpinning of growth, which is what we've seen since the beginning of the company. There's something that is new that we have some of these companies that are scaling incredibly fast to a level that we've never seen in the industry or any industry really before, which creates new dynamics. This is why we can be a bit surprised when we see a customer renew early just a few quarters into their starting to adopt the product. In general, though, we're getting a larger number of these customers. The AI-native cohort is broadening.
We have many more customers, many more large customers into that cohort. We called out a few wins, like we landed another AI lab, for example, this quarter, that's in the notes. The long term, this is going to broaden. This is going to represent the much larger fraction of our customer base, and as a result, there will be more stability over time. I still don't think it's a very unstable business. I mean, we're talking about a change of a few percentage, quarter to quarter, in terms of where we end up versus where we think we're going to be. But, we think at the end of the day, this is a usage-based model, and we get more visibility into the mid-to-long term than we do into the very short term.
I do want to remind everybody that all things being equal, the sequential between Q3 and Q4 tends to be less because of the late December effect when our usage-based products and vacations, and some code freezes. That can be transparent based on the other factors, or it might be underneath of that, but we do have that effect in Q4, which we don't have in the other quarters.
These are really helpful comments. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Your line is open.
Thanks. Can I stay on one last time, one last question on this one?
Yeah.
So, if I think about the customers renewed early, so they get better pricing, but obviously, the volume is going kind of going crazy there, but it kind of creates a short-term headwind because the same volume is now on a lower price, but then the volume grows, and from then on, in a couple of quarters, we should see the normal progression. Is that kind of the right thing to think about? I think we had that in the past, but I just wanted to clarify that—
Yeah.
—and then I had one follow-up.
Yeah, that's broadly what happens. There's a few other things that typically happen in those situations, which is they try to understand what it is they're going to need, so they look at what they're using and they think, "Okay, this part, maybe we don't need as much of. This part, we probably need more of." Or maybe in some situations, we tell them, "Hey, maybe you should use this different tier of retention for this type of data because of the way you're using it." So, there's a bit of account optimization there when we work with them. This is on the background of growth. These customers are growing and they're deploying much larger workloads, and they're looking at doubling, tripling, quadrupling their footprint with us over time, and this is basically what we're working on with them.
Okay, perfect. The main question for me was, on the ex-AI part, like historically, we would think about that growth coming from cloud migration, people modernizing and doing more stuff. You mentioned another aspect, which is because of AI, et cetera, we can code more, there's more application modernization, all this stuff's happening. So, is this changing in the way it's evolving for you from classically with people modernizing, they have to go to Datadog, thank you very much, while now actually the companies are working differently, and that's also starting to drive the ex-AI business? Can you speak to that, please?
Well, there's one thing I didn't mention on the call that's always true. We also do more things for our customers. We consolidate a lot of what they were using. We have more products. We cover more of the surface area. As it comes to customers building more with AI, it also brings some of our other products more into the front and center. So, an example is customers are building a lot more software, so they're putting a lot more pressure on their CI and deployment and testing, and so they're starting also to adopt more of our CI products. I think we called out a few wins around that too in the call. So, that opens the door for more products beyond core observability for us.
Yeah. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Well done.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Samik Chatterjee from JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I had a couple. Maybe for the first one, I know you mentioned your largest customer did spend above their commit in Q3.
Is there any way to tell us how much of the beat relative to your guidance in Q3 was because of the large customer spending of the commit relative to the rest of the business on how you forecasted them in Q3? I have a quick follow-up.
Yeah, we are not being specific, but it is true. It is true that if you are basically guiding below there, we said we would be conservative in Q3. We said conservative relative to what they were spending, and in Q4, we have been explicit and said minimum commitment. It is true that if they spend more than that, that would be implicit beat mathematically. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, again, we did not change any assumption there over time.
Yeah.
We kept everything unchanged. I think the one difference we brought up earlier, the one difference since the last quarter is some positive trends on the overall customer growth, but also some early renewals of larger customers, which include some other AI customers. That is the one thing we should remember as being the difference.
Yeah, sure. For my follow-up, the contribution of revenue from new customers continues to ramp up steadily. Can you just talk about what is the average land size that you are seeing now with new customers and how that has changed, and what sort of behavior you are seeing on that front? How are you thinking about it as you move into next year in terms of how much new customers contribute to your overall growth? Thank you.
We have not provided guidance on, we said over time, we have seen an increase of average land size due to the increase of the platform, and as we give the metrics on the adoption of products, the adoption of more parts of the platform. Oli, do you want to?
Yeah, I think, look, this is something we see in the customer base, that we see that one is with the new and the AI-native companies, some of them start with more scale earlier. Like we have discussed it before, but we see companies scaling faster than they used to, so they represent more of the revenue faster. But we also are developing new segments and landing large customers from day one. We called out a few on the script today. We mentioned, I think, a defense agency in the U.S. government. We mentioned Japanese banks, like two of the three largest Japanese banks in the same quarters. Those are all sizable low land deals. If you compare the business to what it was, say, five years ago, this is definitely a new side of the business that we did not necessarily have before.
By the way, those wins I mentioned, they do not even register into the revenue yet, because these are lands, but these are not customers that are ramped to date yet.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Matt Hedberg from RBC. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. Appreciate it. I wanted to start with training. You noted in your script you had an eight-figure, I think, annualized expansion with an AI division of a large software company. Sounds like they are using you guys for AI training workloads. I guess, to us, this seems like a really interesting growth opportunity. Can you step back and kind of talk about what that training opportunity is, and what could it mean for your growth?
I mean, it has been evolving positively. If you look a year or two years ago, basically nobody was doing training. It was only a few frontier labs were doing their own training, and nobody else was. Now we see an order of magnitude more large-ish labs or neo labs that are doing training at a large scale. Then there is another whole category of companies below that that are starting to do their own, including us. We started doing training at a pretty decent scale, and we showed some of the results. We discussed some of the results on the call as well. So, I think there is some interesting potential development there where training becomes a part of everybody's business and everybody is customizing model and building their own. So we are investing. I would say it is still early to call it as a mass market.
Right now, we see some interesting indications of it. We also see that we can be extremely useful to some very large customers. But I think we still have to invest, we still have to build, we still have to see how that market develops.
Got it. And actually, David, if I could just have one more follow-up.
Yeah.
On your largest customer, you used the word substantially above their minimums, which I find interesting.
Yeah.
I know you are assuming only the minimums for Q4, but philosophically, looking at this customer and their recent consumption patterns, does this perhaps change your opinion about how they might use Datadog longer term, maybe new use cases above and beyond what they are using today that could make that growth opportunity really interesting for this customer?
I think that is true for any customer that there are many different use cases. For that in particular, as we said all along for many quarters, we do not control. We have the contract, the renewal, and we are not in the business of projecting that. But it is true from across our customer base that there are many use cases in a company, whether it be division and end user, et cetera. Oli, you want?
All right, thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Karl Keirstead from UBS. Your line is open.
Okay. Great. Thank you. Maybe Olivier, for you, you mentioned in your comments that a lot of customers are grappling with higher token costs, higher AI spend, and are trying to get it under control. I am just wondering, based on all your customer interactions, how enterprise spending behavior is changing in light of the fact that they are trying to get their token costs under control, and to the extent that any of the customers that early renewed to try to get price discounts were not AI natives, they were traditional enterprises. Do you think that might be because they are trying to grapple with budget pressure? Thanks so much.
Yeah, so I think, look, this is a very widespread problem. I think what we have seen is there has been an explosion of adoption of AI, in particular coding agents, and that was not planned largely. A year ago, nobody had the amount they spend in their budgets on AI. So, everybody had to try and figure out what that works and what part of that they actually need and what they get from that. So there is a strong need for tooling, which is something we provide. It is a great opportunity for us, and we see great growth and adoption of our Cloud Cost Management products from that, or Agent Console. These are all products that. Now, in terms of the early renewal that we see, they are not directly related to that.
I think they come from large customers that are either AI labs or that are tech companies in general, I would say. And that does not really have anything to do with their own token consumption. It has more to do with their own growth as a business.
Okay. Thank you.
Next question will come from the line of Fatima Boolani from Citi. Your line is open.
Hi, good morning again. This is Joel on for Fatima. I will maybe just ask two real quick. Firstly, just on margins and operating and gross income leverage, maybe for you, David. Strong results this quarter, at least relative to our expectations, but we do know there is also certain areas that you are investing fairly heavily in. Just curious what some of the drivers of the performance were specifically this quarter, and then what your updated or what your latest investment posture is. Then just the quick second question, I will just throw it in now, is any data points on Bits AI penetration specifically in the customer base? Thank you.
Do you want to go?
Yeah, I will go margins first.
—margins, and then
Yeah.
You can do the—
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's very similar to what we said. We are investing aggressively in the go-to-market. We continue to have white space uncovered, both from a geographical or an end market, for instance, Fed. And we are continuing to be successful in selling our quota capacity, and you see that in the growth. In addition, we're continuing to invest in R&D. In this case, it's a combination of AI, of investments in a combination of AI and people. We see lots of opportunity. I think Oli will now go talk about the products, but we continue to see a lot of opportunity for us to get market share, get platform penetration, and increase our feet on the street or on the global basis. Want to go over the Bits?
Yeah. On Bits, I mean, we've mentioned on the call, we see amazing adoption of it. When we look at the number of individual customers or users that are using it, this has been the strongest launch we've ever had as a product, so we feel very good about it. We've also revamped the way we package it over the past quarter. So, we used to charge specifically for investigations. Now, we have a model of AI credits that cover a whole different set of use cases that involve Bits as an agent. And we've seen great results thanks to that. So we say super encouraging. We say still early because there's still so much that we are building into Bits, so many things our customers want us to do for them, so many opportunities to automate their workflows. But we feel very, very good about the current status.
Let me just circle back on one thing I think I neglected to go over gross margins, you mentioned. I think it's very similar to what we said before, that through a combination of the penetration of our platform as well as our engineering, we have been plus or minus in this 80% range. I think you see in this quarter, we ended up around 81%. This is common practice for us. We invest, optimize, do engineering projects, and what was communicated in gross margin indicates stability there, which we've evidenced in previous quarters.
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Kirk Materne from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Yeah, thanks very much for taking the question. I guess, David, or Oli, on this native AI cohort that's renewing a little bit early, obviously, they're coming back because they're spending so much with you all and obviously want to get better economics. I'm just curious, what's the sort of attach rate on some of those newer renewals? When they come back and renew early, do you still have time to sort of ups or cross-sell them some of the other products? I guess, what are you seeing in that dynamic? I realize it creates some near-term headwinds from a revenue perspective, but it also, I think, open up the opportunity to have a discussion about expanding their usage across multiple products. Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, look, if you look at these cohorts, and if you compare them in particular to the non-native cohorts we might have had like five or six years ago, these are adopting many more products. We see much broader products adoption and platform adoption with those customers than we saw five, six years ago. So, that's definitely something that is happening. Sometimes happening at renewal time, sometimes just happening organically, as new needs emerge and/or we spread to more teams inside those companies.
But I think it's important to clarify, these are renewals, but they are at higher levels than their previous commit, which is how they're getting the volume discounts. But we are renewing these customers at higher commits.
Okay. And David, I guess just for you, I mean, this would seem this cohort coming up for renewal earlier, it's all good over the long term. I'd imagine just—
Yeah.
—visibility is a little bit harder from a sequential perspective. Is that sort of to Oli's comments on the long term, I'd imagine it's all good from a longer term perspective—
Yeah.
—but it just creates a little bit more volatility for you on a sort of quarter out guidance perspective. Is that fair?
I would say it has a small amount of variation in the timing of the revenue path of these customers. The sequential here was really three things. It was really, one, that factor. Two, I think we mentioned the largest customer in the guide, which we're not predicting what they're going to do. Three is, we know about the small amount of seasonality. So, it's one of the factors. We try to get a good sense of that, but of course, as our RPO and as our contract, as we extend, it does create some volatility around the edges in the sequential nature.
But again, it's all good news.
Yeah.
Look, we are a usage-based model, and when we deal with fast growth customers, these customers themselves don't know exactly how they are going to grow over the next few months and what part of their business and how their consumption is going to change. So, we happily work with them and make sure that we support their growth, and we believe that's right. The only time we think about it in difficult terms is when we prepare for earnings calls—
Yeah.
—and we have to figure out, okay, so what part can we communicate, what part do we know, what part do we not know? But overall, these are all great news, great customers, great growth, great adoption, amazing trends that are underpinning the industry as a whole, so we feel very good about it.
Yeah, and this is similar to what we've, in the company's existence, as you talked about. I mean, our motion is to increase the commitment of customers, broaden the platform, and extend the contract. So, that's what we do all the time. It has some variability, but is very similar to what we've been doing in the company throughout its history, and it's a good thing.
Super. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Peter Weed from Bernstein Research. Your line is open.
Thank you so much. You talked about it a little bit, but it's really exciting to hear about the release of the Bits AI Scout and the strong early adoption. Could you help numerate that a little bit and maybe remind us how the pricing works there? Is it kind of directly monetized, or does it really drive the adoption or use of Bits AI overall? It would be really exciting to kind of appreciate how broad Bits AI adoption is now and how it might move the needle on overall growth and perhaps become another major pillar for the business.
Yeah. It's actually a bit of both. Look, it largely sits on all of the data we acquire and the way we can process it and all the various products we have. That's the core. But we also have a model where we charge for AI credit specifically for what Bits does on top of that. And the model we've chosen is a model where we stay fairly close to inference costs there, so that we can pass on the savings as the models become more efficient to our customers, and so we can run many more investigations.
The reason we've done that is the field is changing so fast, and we're improving the efficiency of those models so fast that it's not very productive to have a fixed price on everything you do as you expect the volume of things you do to increase by orders of magnitude while the price goes down by orders of magnitude as well. We decided on that model for that, which works really well. Long term, we expect both to monetize Bits directly as we do today and to drive broader adoption of the platform and deliver more value to our customers. In terms of what becomes the dominant monetization, it's hard to tell, and we don't really care. Again, we're fully usage-based, so as long as we get more usage, deliver more value, we'll be fine.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Koji Ikeda from Bank of America. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hey, thanks, guys. I wanted to ask a question on Infrastructure Monitoring. You guys disclosed it's now exceeding $2 billion in ARR and growing in the mid-30s. Could you quantify how different that growth rate is from when you last disclosed the scale of this business at $1.5 billion earlier this year? How much of that growth is coming from AI infrastructure, and how sustainable is that growth rate as GPU efficiency improves? Thank you.
I mean, look, we have seen acceleration of the business in general, and not just thanks to AI initiatives, but also thanks to the rest of the customer base. We mentioned that, and that applies to Infrastructure Monitoring also. Today, that growth is not actually related directly to GPUs. The GPUs are still largely on, we see them for our customers on training. We have products there, but we do not monetize those products widely yet. For us, that is an opportunity we have in front of us. That is not something that is baked into the current growth and the current numbers.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Patrick Colville from Scotiabank. Your line is open.
Thank you so much for having me on. To me, one of the most interesting points in the prepared remarks was about Datadog training your own frontier models. Olivier, your comments around this behavior is not mass market, but seeing how the market develops. I want to ask you, because you are at the forefront of how things are changing. How does this affect Datadog's use of proprietary tokens internally or for customers versus open-weight tokens? Then I guess, David, if this shift that Olivier is describing picks up steam, what might that mean for Datadog profitability? It nicely increased this quarter, but is there potential that this might help the bottom line as well? Thank you.
Look, what we see internally and what we see with customers is there is a mix of models that are being used. I think I can say we and include both customers and us into that collective we because the behaviors are fairly similar. We are big consumers of the top labs, top models, but we also consume open-weight models, a growing amount of open-weight models, and we train our own and post-train our own. I think it is probably representative of where the industry as a whole is going. We do that because there are certain things you can only get from the top-of-the-line models that are being generally trained by others, and there is a number of things that are good enough and very cost-efficient with open-weight models you can just pick up and run.
And there's finally a number of other things that you can make way more efficient with your own data, your own workflow, and your own post-training, which is what we've done with some of the models we've announced. I expect that mix to remain about the same. In terms of the impact on margin, look, at the end of the day, you get some control on what you spend your money on. If it's very proprietary to you and you can deliver superior economics, you should absolutely do so. If not, if it's very undifferentiated and applies broadly in some parts of your business that are the same to millions of other businesses, then it's fine probably to use off-the-shelf models and keep continuing those.
That's so clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Alex Zukin from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for getting me in. Oli, maybe a quick one for you and David to follow up. To what extent are you seeing the demand for Agent Observability from both AI natives and the core driving demand for offerings like your Traces product? What has changed here longer term, just given the elevated adoption levels, and maybe also any comments on cybersecurity and the plans there?
Yeah. So we see growing demand for Agent Observability. There was always interesting demand from the AI natives, et cetera, but what is most interesting here is the non-AI natives are consuming more and more, and because they are getting deeper into AI, we see real demand, real volumes, and a really exciting pipeline for those products, actually. So we think that this is crossing the chasm, so to speak, and that is exciting for this product, even though we did not mention any hard numbers today on that. On cybersecurity, look, there are so many new opportunities with AI. We are very happy to see that we can land the full platform with large customers. We mentioned that for a defense agency. We mentioned that also for a couple of other wins when we landed not just observability, but our security platform at the same time.
So we feel good about the market fit there, and we feel good about the way the whole retooling and rebuild that is taking place with AI is playing in our favor.
Perfect. David, maybe for you, just a clarification. First of all, it is great to hear about the renewal with your largest customer, and I think we totally understand the guidance for the minimum for Q4. Any pearls of wisdom on how to think about modeling that for 2027? Because presumably, that is a one-year contract, and is that something we should think about kind of maintaining at some level? Is that something that you guys are going to take out of the model? If I think about how you are guiding with respect to some of those other early renewals for the AI natives that renewed, are those also at the minimum commitment level? Are those slightly above? Just any help on those two items I think would be helpful for—
Yeah. Reminding everybody. Sorry. We will give guidance for 2027 on our year-end call. I think we have said in the last couple quarters that we are guiding at whatever the contractual minimums, and we repeated that this quarter. We will give some more flavor on that when we do 2027. In terms of the rest of the business, what we do is, and we have said this over the many years, is we take the growth rate of those customers and we discount that. So that would be how we apply it across the customer base in taking the most recent organic growth and then discount it. We would certainly be doing that for both the early renewal customers and our broader customer base.
Thank you, guys.
All right. I think that's it for our questions today. Thank you all for listening. I also want to thank everybody at Datadog for a great Q3. I know we are right in the middle of an even greater Q4. We're all very, very busy. I'm going to meet a lot of our customers at the largest AWS conference in a few weeks. We hope to have many more exciting product announcements to share soon. Thank you very much all, and see you next quarter.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.