Nvidia Reports Strong Revenue, Earnings Growth
Nvidia is back. Way back. After four straight down quarters, the GPU juggernaut announced blockbuster earnings for the period ended January 26, beating analysts’ expectations for both revenue and profits, and showing particular strength in the data center server processor market.
The company reported sales of $3.11 billion and earned an adjusted $1.89 a share, exceeding predictions of $1.67 per share and sales of $2.97 billion. That’s an earnings increase of 136 percent and a sales jump of 41 percent. Revenue from the data center sector, where Nvidia GPU’s are widely used for AI and machine learning workloads, totaled $958 million, up 43 percent.
Investors rewarded the company by driving up share prices by 6.5 percent, to $288.50, in after-market trading, rising further in today’s session to $290, as of this writing.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang
“Adoption of NVIDIA accelerated computing drove excellent results, with record data center revenue,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “Our initiatives are achieving great success.”
The news precedes Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in San Jose, March 23-26, during which, it’s speculated, the company will announce a next-gen 7nm Ampere GPU – compared with its current-generation 12nm Turing GPU – promising higher throughput and greater processor density. If true, Ampere would compete head-to-head with AMD’s 7nm Navi GPU.
“Nvidia had an incredible quarter with record revenue in many places,” said Patrick Moorhead, founder and CEO of industry watcher Moor Insights & Strategy. “Key drivers were PC gaming driven by RTX and SUPER lines, data center driven by cloud giants with machine learning and even growth in professional visualization. I was a bit disappointed by the flat automotive number, but it makes sense given the end customer puts and takes. It was a great end to the fiscal year.”
