Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to GSI Technology second quarter fiscal 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. At this time, we will provide instructions for those interested in entering for the Q&A. Before we begin today's call, the company has requested that I read the following safe harbor statement. The matters discussed in this conference call may include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future performance of GSI Technology that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks and uncertainties are described in the company's Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Additionally, I have also been asked to advise you that this conference call is being recorded today, October 28, 2021, at the request of GSI Technology. Hosting the call today is Lee-Lean Shu, the company's Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer. With him are Douglas Schirle, Chief Financial Officer, and Didier Lasserre, Vice President of Sales. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Shu. Please go ahead, sir.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to review our fiscal second quarter 2022 financial results. Our revenue increased by 17% year-over-year for the second quarter of fiscal 2022 to $7.8 million compared to $6.7 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2021, at the high end of the guidance provided earlier in the second quarter. For the first half of fiscal 2022, revenue is up 25% compared to fiscal 2021. Sales to Nokia, our largest SOM customer, have stabilized despite ongoing supply chain challenges that are troubling our industry. We reduced our net loss by 22% year-over-year as a result of higher revenue and gross profit, and only a modest increase in operating expenses on a year-to-date basis.
At quarter end, we had nearly $51 million in cash equivalents, and short-term investments to support the launch of new products and sales and marketing efforts to build a pipeline of opportunities. Our legacy SOM business is profitable and generate cash flow to support the development and pending launch of our radiation-tolerant devices and the Gemini APU solutions. We continue to advance our key initiative with ongoing APU and radiation-tolerant opportunities. We are progressing in the current customer engagements for both categories and have added a few new beta customer engagement for the APU. We continue to prioritize the allocation of our capital toward the APU, which we believe is central to the long-term value of the company, given the unique opportunity for our novel technology. We are committed to our strategic investment in APU.
Through our own detailed analysis of market data, we estimate that the global TAM for APU search application is approximately $137 billion. Later in the call, Didier will discuss our assumption and the market represented to illustrate in more detail our conviction regarding this strategic investment. We were recently selected to be an organizer and judge for the billion-scale approximate nearest neighbor search challenge, a first of its kind competition in large scale approximate nearest neighbor search, ANNS. The event is being hosted by NeurIPS as part of its annual conference on neural information processing systems. GSI is one of the members of a panel led by Microsoft that includes AI thought leaders from industry and academia. Participating teams submission will be evaluated against challenge datasets containing at least 1 billion vector records.
The winning teams will be announced at the NeurIPS 2021 conference in December. Recent events in ANNS techniques for search, recommendation, and ranking require supporting 1 billion training or large data sets. This competition is to help establish a consensus on which algorithms are effective at this scale. ANNS is important to search, retrieval, and recommendation. The challenge for ANNS algorithm designers is to create a data structure that enables fast retrieval of the K nearest neighbor even as the database size grows. The trade-off between accuracy, measured typically as a recall, and the search latency, measured typically as query throughput, is important in evaluating ANNS performance. Several implementations of large-scale ANNS are now powering enterprise-grade mission critical and scale search applications.
In these scenarios, benchmarks such as costs, pre-processing time and the power consumption become just as important as the recall versus the latency trade-off. I have discussed on past calls the APU's advantage in power consumption. From our relationship with [all the top] to crypto miners who run their own private hardware, we all know the importance of acquiring power efficient hardware to lower the power bill. Power is a big problem today, from how much we consume to generating the power for our machines. Here are a couple of eye-opening statistics. Global data centers consume an estimated 205 terawatt-hours in 2018, or 1% of global electricity use. The amount of energy used by data centers doubles approximately every four years, meaning that data centers have the fastest growing carbon footprint of any area within the IT sector.
This problem will likely increase as workloads become more data-intensive and AI-centric. New hardware and chipsets specifically designed for power efficiency will continue to be a major component of the design of future data centers. Solving this problem is one of the strategic opportunities for our technology. GSI can document in numerous applications that our technology brings enormous power saving because our typical system require a much smaller footprint. We lower the overall total cost of ownership. Two of the leaderboards in the billion-scale approximate nearest neighbor search challenge competition will rank participants relative to power usage and hardware costs. Like the other organizers and panelists, GSI will have a submission to the competition. Of course, we hope to attain a leadership outcome for our submission and garner increased visibility with other competitors, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel, and other leading AI hardware vendors.
We mentioned on our last call that we are a partner in OpenSearch 1.0, launched by AWS with our Elasticsearch KNN plugin. We are still in the early stage of developing this opportunity. We have a functioning server in our Silicon Valley data center, where we have had an initial customer demo. At this time, the release of the new OpenSearch 2.0 protocol has been delayed, pushing out the timing of our launch. We expect our next round of demos will happen once the next version of OpenSearch is released. It's our goal to open our facility to beta customers in calendar 2022. This quarter, we successfully raised the profile of GSI in the industry with our participation in the ANNS competitions.
We are moving forward with opportunities that have followed our recent success in prior competition with the APU and the announcement of the radiation-tolerant NASA award. The GSI team has been working tirelessly to raise our profile with the goal of leading beta customers and building a pipeline of business. I sincerely thank you for your support as a fellow GSI shareholder. Now I'll hand the call over to DD, who will discuss our business performance further. Please go ahead, DD.
Thank you, Lilin. As Lilin stated, we have identified the market segments we believe are most relevant to the APU and defined our Total Available Market or TAM, and also our Serviceable Available Market or SAM. Starting with the total opportunity for the APU search applications based on the available data, we estimate the global TAM is $137 billion in 2021, and will grow at a CAGR of approximately 20% to $287 billion by 2025. Our SAM is $4.5 billion in 2021, growing to $10 billion by 2025. The multiple search market segments we include in our analysis include computer vision, synthetic aperture radar, drug discovery, cybersecurity and service markets such as NoSQL, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, which we plan to support with a SaaS solution.
These are market segments where we have currently ongoing customer engagements. Computer vision is a broad term that includes image and object recognition, facial and body recognition, warehouse robotics, automatic target recognition, and dense registration, which is aligning a photo image with a previous one, which is beneficial for mapping. These are all markets where our chip is highly relevant. Near term, we are engaged with opportunities in facial recognition, object identification, SAR, and re-identification. Re-identification is the sorting of faces or objects not in the database that allows this unknown object to be recognized and note any patterns related to where and when their image is captured. With regard to the supply chain constraints facing our industry, like many semiconductor companies, we face a one-year lead time on substrates used in our chip assembly, and supply remains tight.
There was a fire at one of our substrate suppliers, but they are now back up to 70% capacity, which is helping. In Taiwan, we had a subcontractor that shut down in June for four weeks due to a COVID outbreak in their factory. It's now 100% back in place. Regarding the recently announced TSMC wafer price increases, we are looking at 20% increase in wafer costs, with the new prices becoming effective for all new orders. Overall, the impact of increased assembly costs. I'm sorry, assembly labor costs, rising substrate prices, increased wafer costs, and expedite charges means that we will be increasing our prices to all of our customers.
Moving to the sales breakdown for the second quarter of fiscal 2022, sales to Nokia were $1.9 million or 23.8% of net revenues, compared to $3.4 million or 51.7% of net revenues in the same period a year ago, and $3.8 million or 42.7% of net revenues in the prior quarter. Military defense sales were 27.4% of second-quarter shipments, compared to 26.9% of shipments in the current comparable period a year ago and 20.0% of shipments in the prior quarter. SigmaQuad sales were 52.4% of second-quarter shipments, compared to 65.4% in the second quarter of fiscal 2021 and 63.6% in the prior quarter. I'd now like to hand the call over to Doug. Doug, please go ahead.
Thank you, Didier. We reported a net loss of $4.6 million or 19 cents per diluted share on net revenues of $7.8 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2022, compared to a net loss of $5.2 million or $0.22 per diluted share on net revenues of $6.7 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2021, and a net loss of $4.2 million or $0.17 per diluted share on net revenues of $8.8 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2022. Gross margin was 53.6% compared to 46.7% in the prior year period and 54.4% in the preceding first quarter. The changes in gross margin were primarily due to changes in product mix sold in the three periods.
Total operating expenses in the second quarter of fiscal 2022 were $8.7 million compared to $8.3 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2021 and $9.1 million in the prior quarter. Research and development expenses were $5.9 million compared to $5.7 million in the prior year period and $6.1 million in the prior quarter. Selling, general, and administrative expenses were $2.8 million in the quarter ended September 30, 2021, compared to $2.6 million in the prior year quarter and $3 million in the previous quarter. Second quarter fiscal 2022 operating loss was $4.5 million compared to $5.2 million in the prior year period and $4.4 million in the prior quarter.
Second quarter fiscal 2022 net loss included interest income and other expense net of $8,000 and a tax provision of $42,000 compared to interest income and other expense net of $16,000 and a tax provision of $62,000 for the same period a year ago. In the preceding first quarter, net loss included interest and other expense of $20,000 and a tax benefit of $172,000. Total second quarter pre-tax stock-based compensation expense was $716,000 compared to $653,000 in the comparable period a year ago and $823,000 in the prior quarter.
At September 30th, 2021, the company had $50.7 million in cash equivalents, and short-term investments and $2.8 million in long-term investments, compared to $54 million in cash equivalents, and short-term investments and $5.8 million in long-term investments at March 31st, 2021. Working capital was $53.6 million as of September 30, 2021, versus $56 million at March 31st, 2021, with no debt. Stockholders' equity as of September 30th, 2021 was $69.9 million, compared to $75.6 million as of the fiscal year ended March 31st, 2021. We still see the supply chain constraints having a modest impact on our ability to fill all of our orders.
While there has been some improvement, the supply chain situation remains fluid, and we do not expect significant relief from these constraints before next year. Given these variables, current expectations for the upcoming third quarter are net revenues in the range of $7.2 million-$8.2 million with gross margin of approximately 52%-54%. Operator, at this point, we'll open the call to Q&A.
Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions.
Our first question comes from the line of Rajvindra Gill with Needham & Company. You may proceed with your question.
Yeah. Good afternoon, everybody. This is actually Denis asking a few questions for Raji. I'd like to start off with a question about the price increases. When do you expect that the price increases that you're passing on to your customers will start to show up in the top line?
We are changing backlog, and all new orders as of December first.
All new orders. Got it. Wonderful. The other question that I had was relating to kind of the Gemini-I APU . I think on a few calls ago, you'd mentioned that the Gemini-I APU should be seeing some volume production in this current quarter. How, you know, how is that milestone being met? Are you beginning production or are the supply chain constraints kind of limiting that? Can you give us an update on the Gemini-I volumes?
Yeah. From the component level, I think we are in the pre-production mode, which mean that we are still doing the qualification. It's ready if we see the demand for it. I think right now the major challenge is still on the software. I mean, we have to make a lot of software API ready for the customer. So that the software will be major barrier for the hardware availability.
You're saying that once the software is ready, that will kind of get you one step closer to the actual production of the Gemini-I?
Yeah. From the hardware point of view, yeah, we are ready. We just need to win the application with software. Yeah.
Got it. All right, well, that's all that I had. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Bernstein with Cowen. You may proceed with your question.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Congratulations on the new patent you guys were just issued on the SRAM structure optimized for in-memory computing. From that patent, you can see there's not a large instruction set here, and it's gonna be important for you guys to provide a compiler and software libraries that make the chip easier for people to use. Can you just give us some detail on what the deliverables are there and the timing for those?
I think right now a lot of things we are doing is really for the brand awareness. You know, we do demonstrate we have a good performance compared to other solutions already in the industry. I think we still make a lot of work to develop the market and to win the confidence of the customer. As we have described it before, we have a lot which we are participating in the competition, so winning the award. I mean, all this is for the brand awareness, and hopefully we can demonstrate our capability among our peers and also among the customers. That's our major focus right now.
Jeff, just to add to that, for the deliverables, obviously the compiler stack is critical to that, because, you know, as Lilin mentioned, we're writing a lot of the APIs and the algorithms today. You know, a lot of folks wanna write their own, or there's just, you know, we can't keep up with all the different applications, so the compiler stack is critical.
Yeah.
You know, we're gonna have that released to our beta guys. We already have the beta guys identified. That'll be. We were hoping to do it by the end of the year. It looks like it might be falling into early next year for the beta guys. They'll go through it and they'll play with it and they'll, you know, try to break it and everything else. We'll release it to the general public sometime in 2022. I'm hoping it'll be sometime, you know, first half of 2022 where it'll be available for everyone.
Gotcha. I'm assuming that for certain vertical kinds of applications that are somewhat generalizable that multiple customers might want, like the Synthetic Aperture Radar analysis or object recognition, et cetera, that you guys are doing libraries to make that even easier for people. Is that correct? Can you just, of those vertical markets you touched on earlier, can you just talk about when each of those is gonna be delivered?
Correct. You have both libraries and you also have, you know, further up the stack, you know, the actual APIs or the algorithms. As you mentioned, that has either been done or is being done for things like, you know, the SAR, the Synthetic Aperture Radar. You know that we've written it also for the BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot platform. It's already been done. We've done it for facial recognition and object detection. We are in the process of doing it for the dense registration. And we've done some work on re-identification as well. There has been a lot of work that's been done already.
Gotcha. Is it fair to say that, you know, by the middle of next year, some of these key verticals will basically be covered and very accessible to customers who wanna start using them?
If they want to use our algorithms, correct. Yeah. Like I said, some of the entities we deal with, getting external, you know, software is a problem. The answer is for folks where it's not a problem, those should be available. For folks that wanna write their own, that's where we're relying on the compiler stack being available.
Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Just wanna understand a little bit more about the environment that you're facing out there in terms of sales. Understand that you guys are in the model execution, not training, part of the market. What we see, you know, in the training market, you know, AWS just did an Elasticsearch instance based on the Intel Habana chips. They're kind of open to outsiders. They have their own Trainium custom chips. It looks like Microsoft has got Graphcore, Groq, and Nimbix as training chip partners that they're working with. Whereas some of the others like Baidu, Alibaba, and Google are only doing their own. You know, talk about the not invented here or who's open to look at outside chips among those, you know, big players out there that could be important partners.
Sure. You bring up a good point. Almost all of the large big data guys have internal chip development happening, and they've always had that. But with that said, certainly if you bring a solution that's going to accelerate a search or it's gonna lower the power or it's gonna do something that's important to them, they're open to it. We haven't seen anybody that basically said, "No, we're designing our own." As you said, a lot of the chips these guys are doing are for very specific functions that are important to them. A lot of it is centered around the training, as you mentioned. We haven't seen that level of activity for specific search, which is what we're focused on.
Gotcha. Your feeling is that delivering these kinds of capabilities to some of these large players, they will be open to looking at these and possibly offering, you know, instances on their networks?
Correct. I mean, we've seen that already play out with the OpenSearch. You know, again, we've demoed on 1.0, and we're waiting for 2.0, but, you know, they've already announced us as a partner on that. Yes, they're open.
Gotcha. Okay. Then I just wanted to ask on the non-Nokia customers, 48% of revenue, that's the highest since before the pandemic. Any particular customers that are growing, you know, outside of military or, you know, what's sort of the status of non-Nokia customers?
Yeah, you know, as you look at the numbers, Nokia was down more quarter-over-quarter than our overall revenue was. Obviously the rest of our revenue
Yeah.
Grew outside of that. We saw strength in some areas that, you know, it wasn't one particular area. There was certainly some strength in the military sector. We also had shipped the end of that last order for the rad-tolerant that we had mentioned. We shipped half of it in the June quarter and half of it in this past September quarter. We also saw a little bit of the rebounding in some of our customers that do automotive equipment, test equipment, things like that. Obviously, the automotive sector had been hit by the availability of chips earlier this year, and so they were a little bit quiet the first half, and now that seems to loosen up. Some of the equipment guys have come back to us this past quarter as well.
Gotcha. That's great. Then just a request. You, Jim Roumell , the largest shareholder, has asked you guys to get an IP valuation, which makes sense to me. I think we're now your second biggest non-index holder. Just you know a kinda back of the envelope, it looks like your building that you own at Elko Drive is worth over $10 million potentially. I think it would be worthwhile to have that appraised and have shareholders understand that there's some additional asset here that's significant beyond the cash that you guys have.
That's true. We believe that the building is obviously worth a lot more than what's on the books. We've been in it for over 10 years now. Of course.
Great. Well, it'd be great to have an appraisal of that.
Okay. Our next question comes from the line of Brett Reiss with Janney Montgomery Scott. You may proceed with your question.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. Have any crypto miners in fact approached you in possibly using, you know, the Gemini system?
We have a look at the crypto mining. I think right now in the market, there are dedicated chip developed for them. APU is not designed specific for that. Even though we look at that, we don't believe we are suitable. Okay. From the general purpose, if somebody want a general purpose parallel processor, it probably usable, but not in the form of, you know, doing the crypto mining as a revenue and all that.
Right. Now, for the ongoing customer engagements to vest into material revenues for the company, is the additional engineering that must be done in the control of our company, or is it additional engineering that must be done by the potential customers' engineering teams to make the Gemini system a commercially viable product for us?
It depends, right? The answer is yes to both, right? I mean, we certainly need to continue to develop more algorithms, more libraries, you know, more APIs. Then we also need to make that compiler stack available so that they can do it themselves. Because again, there are way too many potential applications going forward for us to keep up, and there are some people who just don't want to outsource that, so they'll do it themselves. Supplying them that compiler stack will allow them to not have to basically program at the register level. I mean, they'll be able to do it at a much higher level.
The answer is, yeah, we will need to do some of it, and that will be done internally, and then we need to enable our customers to do their own as well.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions.
Thanks, Brett.
Our next question comes from the line of George Gaspar, a private investor. You may proceed with your question.
Hey. Thank you. Good afternoon. Just ongoing with the last question, can you give us a very specific example of the testing on a specific entry into the market that you're running against competition? Can you give us something that would identify with your capacity being much superior to the others out there?
Sure. I can give you one right off the top of the hat. We are engaged with the customer now. We are about ready to do a POC, I'm sorry, a proof of concept, specifically for the SAR, which is the synthetic aperture radar. How we got to where we are today with them is, we did benchmarking for them. It was a benchmark that was based off of, you know, a five-kilometer by five-kilometer image, and they needed resolution down to a half a meter in one second or one millisecond, sorry. We did the benchmarking on CPUs, we did them on GPUs, and we did them on our APU, the Gemini.
We showed them all the test data and the benchmarking, and that. We ended up, you know, being chosen. We're going through the process now of, you know, doing the POC definition with them. That SAR application is a perfect example of, you know, they actually looked at the data from the three possible chip technologies and chose GSI.
Okay. Oh, interesting. Just ongoing on that, getting back over on the defense military side. There seems to be a continuing requirement for space work that to identify and interpret higher faster speeds. Is there any possibility of you expanding your activity in on the defense military side because of the speed that the capacity that you have relative to others?
Yeah, absolutely. Several of these applications we've talked about, SAR, object detection, ATR, which is the automatic target recognition, all those are kind of a military application. There are certainly other ones we've worked on, signal classification and such. There are certainly several sectors and applications we've worked on for that market. You know, as you know, we partnered with Space Micro and won a NASA SBIR, and that SBIR was around what NASA calls an IPU, which is an inference processing unit, but it's essentially a ruggedized board using our solution that could be used in space.
You know, as we discussed, it was some time ago, almost coming up on two years ago, we did some initial SEL testing on the APU, and it came back very, very good. We are going to sometime in hopefully the first half of 2022 follow on that testing and do you know, SEU and SEFI kind of testing to round out everything that's required to be able to put the Gemini into space. Yeah, we're certainly going to continue to pursue that avenue as well.
Oh, that's very interesting. Thank you for that. I got one question on the issuance of stock in the last quarter. How many shares have been issued? And was that for issuance to employees basically?
For the increase in shares. Can you elaborate on this aspect?
Yeah, I don't have the actual number here in front of me, George, but it's somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 shares.
Between 100,000-200,000 shares?
Reckon it should be somewhere about 100,000-200,000 shares.
I see. Those-
That includes, you know, since the beginning of the year, fiscal year, there are some ESPP purchases and option exercises. In fact, just this past week or so we had two directors exercise some options, and I believe there are Form 4s out there for each of those.
Okay. All right. At this point, it is being that the stock has been lower for some time here, has there been any purchasing in the marketplace to recover shares that are outstanding?
We haven't done any repurchases for over a year now.
Yeah.
If that's what you're asking.
Okay. Yes. Right. Okay. All right. Thank you kindly.
Thanks for joining us, George.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. Our next question comes from the line of John Fichthorn with Dialectic Capital. You may proceed with your question.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess as a quick follow-up to the last question, I've got to ask, you know, with $50 million in cash and a $10 million building and a bright outlook, maybe why you wouldn't be doing share buybacks right now since it was asked.
Well, you know, we've had a long history of buying back shares. You know, we went public in March of 2007 and netted $30 million in the offering, and we've already repurchased over $61 million worth of our stock. We've already taken, in terms of dollars, 2x off the market based on what the IPO was. You know, we have cash in the bank, but we understand that APU is a very exciting product. There's a very large market that we're addressing with that, but there's still work to do. We just feel that, you know, we wanna make sure that we're gonna be successful. Yeah, the stock is cheap. We all believe that. We think that at this point, given we've already done in terms of stock repurchases, it makes sense to keep the cash at this point and make sure that we're successful with our development efforts.
Well, that makes sense, and it leads to my second question, which is really about your go-to market. You know, you've talked about a proof of concept you're going in. You've talked about competitions that you're entering in. You've talked about a number of your potential customers or maybe even acquirers, who knows, that are also in-house competitors. I guess I don't fully understand, you know, although it now sounds like it's pushed off until kind of Q1, Q2 of next year, what the go-to market strategy is at this point. Maybe you don't know either, but to the extent that maybe I just missed it, I'd love you to kind of give me as much granularity as you're willing to on that.
I mean, so certainly, obviously, we have several possible applications. I mean, the overall umbrella is search. I mean, that's just a generic term, right? You know, under the search falls all these different applications. Obviously, you know, the go-to market is where can we show benefit in these markets, right? Who sees the most value in our solution? That's where we've been focusing and also where's the TAMs as well. You know, that's why we've gone through this TAM analysis, which we've discussed. We've, you know, broken it up by segments. You know, right now it's, you know, going through that process of showing the customers in these segments, you know, what our value is. In some cases, it's lower power.
In some cases it's, you know, faster, you know, more queries or faster response times, more accurate responses. Sometimes it's lower cost. You know, one of the other benefits that we're able to show customers, and this one is really at the beginning stage, and it's taking, you know, some conversations to open up their eyes. You know, we can also offer, in a lot of cases, a mobility aspect to their solution. Where in the past, for them to do a certain function would require cabinets of, you know, CPU-based servers or cabinets of GPU. While with our solution, it could be a couple racks, which can now be put in a plane, in a van, in a submarine or what have you.
You know, that's one of the things that's been able for them to understand that possibility that all of a sudden they can have the solution be mobile as well.
Maybe I should drill down a little bit, though. I get it. You've got a lot of exciting applications. There's a big TAM. Either when or in what application do you think you're furthest along and might get the first signs of revenue? Should we think there's gonna be somebody who signs a piece of paper that says, "I want to pay you for this," and in what application do you think that might be, and/or what couple of applications are you furthest down this chain, not just in a proof of concept, maybe a proof of concept is the furthest, but where are you the furthest today?
I would say it's in the government military sectors. Areas like the SAR application, some of the object detections, that would probably be where we're furthest down the line. I mean, obviously you know that we're gonna be working this OpenSearch 2.0, and that's gonna kick in sometime in 2022, but it'll be instances, so it'll take a little longer for that revenue. It's a service. You know, it's a SaaS model, so that'll take a little longer to kick in. Some of it will kick in in 2022. The question is how much is not. You know, we don't know yet, obviously.
Before the OpenSearch 2.0, will you have revenue from one of these defense-type customers this year? Even if it's just NRE.
Possibly. I mean, the timing is hard to predict with the military guys. The answer is, we should have gotten a board or two purchased about now, and, you know, it may happen by the end of the year, it may fall into early next year. The timing is not always easy to predict with these folks. We're imminent on at least a couple boards. Again, let's be clear, we're not talking volume here. This is still under the kind of a POC where they'll buy a board, they'll test it out, prove to themselves that this is really what it is, what they want, and gives them the results that they want and need, and then we'll go from there. You know, it'll be onesie-twosie kind of things for the-
In terms of being like production revenue, like, you know, real recurring, either SaaS revenue or something else, is that really 2023?
Certainly not earlier than second half of next year. I mean, yeah, I don't see any way second half of next year would be the earliest. Yeah, it could fall into 2023. Again, hard to really predict exactly when that's gonna happen.
Totally understand. You know when the soonest it could be, right? If everything goes well. Fine, second half of next year. The last time, I'll just try and once again specify, like, you know, in the defense department business, I get it, 'cause you're not competing against guys inside the defense department making the same product. In a lot of these other instances in the commercial market, you are. Just give me a quick like, is it just to win competitions and hope people recognize you? 'Cause you're still gonna have guys inside of Google and Microsoft and Baidu and everywhere else going, "No, use ours, you pay us anyway, and we've designed it for our own chip." Or is there like, you guys have feet on the street knocking on doors? Like, just help me understand what the commercial go-to-market strategy is specifically?
No, we're of course talking to these folks. Again, you know, as I mentioned earlier, they're all doing chip designs, like you said, and like, I can't remember if it was Jeff who had mentioned that. But, you know, I we haven't seen where it's really specific on the search per se. It's generally some kind of function. But the guys we're talking to, you know, again, you know, the OpenSearch is part of AWS. And as you say, AWS is doing, or Amazon is doing their own chips. So why is it they've already chosen us as a partner? Because obviously they're not doing anything internal that matches what we're doing. So we, you know, we will always be competing against some internal design. But when I say we, chip manufacturers.
We haven't seen what we're offering are kind of value. We haven't seen the, that effort within these companies in the search area.
The large scale database search is still a very new market. You know, the AWS OpenSearch, they just started just a couple of months ago. We have this competition, billion scale ANNS. I mean, that's the first of its kind. It's the industry never have this competition, this kind of competition before. It's just getting started. Gemini APU is by far we have seen this as the best hardware ever that do this kind of job. Okay. We hope we can perform well in the competition. That will demonstrate our variations in this area.
I mean, I guess my concern is that your point exactly, that this is very new. Very new, right? You're about to get to 2.0, and we're talking about revenue that you know, might start to ramp in late 2023. You know, I just don't know what's your backup plan if we're sitting here having this call at the end of 2023, and you're like, "Well, it should be in second half 2024." It's very new, right? People are still doing evaluations. At the end of 2024 and it's 2025. Like, at what point do you have another path or is there no path? This is the one path and we're all in.
No, no. We are more than that. Well, the search is the one area we are looking at, right? The other thing we talk about is the defense and the government project. You know, the NASA project, I mean, that is to develop the device which can go into space. With this development, you know, the prime contractor can pick up this device and then put into a satellite, and you know, it can apply to many companies and many applications. You know, it's more than the search.
I mean, we talk about we have object recognition, we can do SAR, you know, sensor registration, you know, many computer vision type of applications. So we are hopeful and no, one thing is we are not certain is when the production revenue will come in, but we hope it's coming soon, and we believe so.
Great. Thanks a lot, guys.
Sure.
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