NVIDIA reported record revenue for the second quarter ended August 1, 2021, of $6.51 billion, up 68 percent from a year earlier and up 15 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company’s Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms.
GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.94, up 276 percent from a year ago and up 24 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.04, up 89 percent from a year ago and up 14 percent from the previous quarter.
NVIDIA paid quarterly cash dividends of $100 million in the second quarter. It will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.04 per share on September 23, 2021, to all shareholders of record on September 1, 2021.
On July 19, 2021, the company completed a four-for-one split of its common stock in the form of a stock dividend to shareholders of record as of June 21, 2021. All share and per share amounts presented have been retroactively adjusted to reflect the stock split.
“Nvidia’s pioneering work in accelerated computing continues to advance graphics, scientific computing, and AI,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a statement. “Enabled by the Nvidia platform, developers are creating the most impactful technologies of our time — from natural language understanding and recommender systems, to autonomous vehicles and logistic centers, to digital biology and climate science, to metaverse worlds that obey the laws of physics.”
He called out new technologies such as Nvidia Base Command and Fleet Command for deploying AI at scale, as well as the Omniverse, the simulation platform for engineers that could enable physically realistic virtual worlds and the eventual “metaverse,” Huang said.
More than 500 companies and 50,000 individual creators are evaluating the Omniverse Enterprise platform now.
Huang will receive the chip industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award, at the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) annual awards dinner on November 18. The award is named after Intel co-founder Robert Noyce, who is credited with numerous pioneering achievements at the dawn of the chip industry.
Nvidia has seen a boom in both gaming and data center revenues as users go online during the pandemic. Gamers have been snatching up graphics cards to play PC games, but a shortage of semiconductors has hurt companies like Nvidia, and cryptocurrency miners are also buying up the graphics cards.
Last year, Nvidia completed its $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox, which makes key technologies for connecting chips in data centers. Mellanox revenue is included in the CPU and networking segment. But Nvidia is still waiting on regulatory approval for its $40 billion acquisition of Arm.
Nvidia CFO Collette Kress said, "Although some Arm licensees have expressed concerns or objected to the transaction, and discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, we are confident in the deal and that regulators should recognize the benefits of the acquisition to Arm, its licensees, and the industry."
Datacenter
Datacenter revenues hit $2.37 billion, up 35% from a year earlier. Nvidia launched a variety of products in the quarter, and it said it is in 342 of the latestTop500 supercomputers in the world. Nvidia said it foresees the growth rate accelerating for datacenter revenues. In an analyst call, Huang said that AI model parameters are doubling every two months, and that is driving a lot of growth for supercomputers and other AI hardware.
Nvidia noted its Inception acceleration program for AI startups has more than 8,500 members, and those companies have raised more than $60 billion across 90 countries. Its CUDA tech has now been downloaded 27 million times over 15 years.
“Almost every company in the world has to be a high-performance computing company now,” Huang said. “You see that cloud service providers one after another are building effectively supercomputers.”
Gaming
As noted, gaming revenue was $3.06 billion, up 85% from a year earlier and up 11% from the previous quarter. Nvidia launched its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti graphics cards in the quarter, giving gaming PCs a 50% boost in graphics performance over the prior generation. And Nvidia RTX (for better shadows and lighting) is now in 130 games and applications.
GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud gaming platform, now has more than 1,000 PC games. Kress said Nvidia is supply constrained for the gaming business in desktop and laptop products.
Nvidia in recent quarters has created low hash-rate cards aimed at cryptocurrency miners so that they don’t buy up all of the gaming graphics cards. Going forward, Nvidia expects minimal contribution to revenues from crypto mining cards.
Nvidia’s cryptocurrency chip product, CMP, had lower sales, at $266 million, than the $400 million the company predicted in May.
“In an effort to address the needs of minders and direct GeForce to gamers, we increased the supply of cryptocurrency mining processors, or CMP, and introduced low-hash rate GeForce GPUs with limited Ethereum mining capability,” she said. “Over 80% of our Ampere architecture-based GeForce shipments in the quarter were low hash-rate GPUs.”
But she said the combination of crypto and gaming revenue is hard to quantify.
Professional visualization
Professional visualization generated revenues of $519 million, up 156% from a year earlier and up 40% from the previous quarter. A lot of that demand was driven by the need to outfit design offices at home as remote work becomes the norm.
Automotive
Second-quarter automotive revenue was $152 million, up 37% from a year earlier and down 1% from the previous quarter. Nvidia announced during the quarter that the AutoX Gen5 robot taxi platform is using Nvidia Drive technology.
Outlook
For the third quarter ending October 31, analysts expect earnings to be $1.04 a share on revenue of $6.53 billion. Nvidia said it expects revenue to come in at $6.80 billion, driven by accelerating growth in data center revenues. The company expects gaming demand to exceed supply, though gaming is expected to grow. For the full fiscal year, analysts expect Nvidia to report earnings of $3.95 a share on revenue of $24.9 billion.
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