(May 27) Nvidia today reported record revenue for the first quarter ended May 2, 2021, of $5.66 billion, up 84 percent from a year earlier and up 13 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company’s Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms.
- Nvidia Q1 Non-GAAP EPS of $3.66beats by $0.38; GAAP EPS of $3.03beats by $0.51.
- Revenue of $5.66B (+83.8% Y/Y)beats by $250M.
Outlook for the second quarter of fiscal 2022 is as follows:
- Revenue is expected to be $6.30 billion, plus or minus 2 percent vs. $5.48B consensus.
- GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 64.6 percent and 66.5 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points.
- GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $1.76 billion and $1.26 billion, respectively.
- GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are both expected to be an expense of approximately $50 million.
- GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are both expected to be 10 percent, plus or minus 1 percent, excluding any discrete items. GAAP discrete items include excess tax benefits or deficiencies related to stock-based compensation, which are expected to generate variability on a quarter-by-quarter basis.
Shares of Nvidia fell nearly 1% in afterhour trading.
“Our Data Center (VPN) business continues to expand, as the world’s industries take up NVIDIA AI to process computer vision, conversational AI, natural language understanding and recommender systems. NVIDIA RTX has reinvented computer graphics and is driving upgrades across the gaming and design markets. Our partners are launching the largest-ever wave of NVIDIA-powered laptops. Across industries, the adoption of NVIDIA computing platforms is accelerating.
“Mellanox, one year in, has exceeded our expectations and transformed NVIDIA into a data-center-scale computing company. We continue to make headway with our planned acquisition of Arm, which will accelerate innovation and growth for the Arm ecosystem. From gaming, cloud computing, AI, robotics, self-driving cars, to genomics and computational biology, NVIDIA continues to do impactful work to invent a better future,” he said.
NVIDIA paid quarterly cash dividends of $99 million in the first quarter. It will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.16 per share on July 1, 2021, to all shareholders of record on June 10, 2021.
On May 21, 2021, the company’s board of directors declared a four-for-one split of NVIDIA’s common stock payable in the form of a stock dividend, with the additional shares expected to be distributed on July 19, 2021. The stock dividend is conditioned on obtaining stockholder approval at the company’s 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders on June 3, 2021, to increase the number of authorized shares of common stock from 2 billion to 4 billion.
Highlights
NVIDIA achieved progress since its previous earnings announcement in these areas:
Gaming
- First-quarter revenue was a record $2.76 billion, up 106 percent from a year earlier and up 11 percent from the previous quarter.
- Broadened the wave of laptops powered by NVIDIA’s second-generation RTX graphics with the launch ofGeForce RTX™ 3060 Laptop GPU systemsstarting at $999, and the announcement ofGeForce®3050 Ti and 3050 Laptop GPU systemsstarting at $799 and aimed at gamers and creators.
- AcceleratedRTX momentumwith now over 60 games, includingCall of Duty Modern Warfare,Crysis RemasteredandOutriders.
- Took steps to improve gamers’ access to GeForce GPUs byreducing the Ethereum hash rate on newly manufactured RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti graphics cards-- which carry a “Lite Hash Rate,” or “LHR,” identifier -- in addition toprevious steps to lower the RTX 3060’s hash rate.
- Announced thatNVIDIA DLSS is available now in Unreal Engine 4and soon in theUnity game engine.
- Announced thatNVIDIA Reflex, which reduces system latency, is now incorporated intoCall of Duty Warzone,OverwatchandRainbow Six: Siege.
- Announced thatGeForce NOW™, now in its second year, has over 10 million members in more than 70 countries and is approaching 1,000 games in its library.
Data Center
- First-quarter revenue was a record $2.05 billion, up 79 percent from a year earlier and up 8 percent from the previous quarter.
- Hosted its largest-everGPU Technology Conference, virtually, with more than 200,000 registrations from 195 countries, and an opening keynote with over 14 million views.
- UnveiledNVIDIA Grace™, its first Arm-based data center CPU, designed for giant-scale AI and high performance computing, which will deliver 10x the performance of today’s fastest servers and power theworld’s most powerful AI-capable supercomputerat the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre.
- Collaborated with Amazon Web Services to deployNVIDIA GPU inferencingthrough GPU-accelerated, AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances, enabling GPU-accelerated games to run natively on AWS and allowing greater performance for Arm-based workloads.
- Unveiled theNVIDIA®BlueField-3®DPU, the first data processing unit built for AI and accelerated computing, with support from VMware, Splunk, NetApp, Cloudflare and others.
- Announced thenew NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™, the first cloud-native, multi-tenant supercomputer, with customers in conversational AI, drug discovery, autonomous vehicles and more.
- Announced that its AI inference platform, expanded withNVIDIA A30 and A10 GPUsfor mainstream servers, set records across every category in the latest release of the MLPerf benchmark for AI performance across a range of workloads.
- Announced theNVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite for VMware vSphere, enabling scale-out, multi-node performance and compatibility for a range of applications and data science.
- Introduced theNVIDIA Morpheus AIapplication framework to enable cybersecurity providers to instantly detect cyber breaches using AI and NVIDIA BlueField DPUs.
- Announced availability ofNVIDIA Jarvis, a framework for interactive conversational AI, andNVIDIA Maxine™, a framework for real-time video-based experiences.
- UnveiledNVIDIA TAO, a framework for accelerating the creation of enterprise AI applications.
- Expanded its work supportingdrug development and discovery with NVIDIA Clara Discovery, announcing a partnership with Schrödinger to support the pharmaceutical industry with AI software to speed drug-discovery workflows.
Professional Visualization
- First-quarter revenue was a record $372 million, up 21 percent both from a year earlier and the previous quarter.
- Launched NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprisesoftware for real-time 3D design and collaboration, with BMW Group, Foster + Partners and WPP as early customers.
- UnveiledNVIDIA RTX™ GPUsfor next-gen laptop and desktop workstations, including the NVIDIA RTX A4000 and A5000 for desktops and the A2000, A3000, A4000 and A5000 for laptops.
- RevealedGANverse3D, an AI model for creating 3D object models from standard 2D images.
Automotive
- First-quarter revenue was $154 million, down 1 percent from a year earlier and up 6 percent from the previous quarter.
- Unveiled NVIDIA DRIVE Atlan™, an AI-enabled processor for autonomous vehicles with 1,000 TOPS and data-center-grade security, targeting automakers’ 2025 vehicles.
- AnnouncedNVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion™ 8, the latest generation of a fully operational, open platform that reduces the time and cost to outfit vehicles with AI and surround sensors.
- Announced thatNVIDIA DRIVE™ will be powering intelligent new energy vehiclesfrom SAIC R Auto, IM Motors, Faraday Future and VinFast, starting in 2022.
- Revealed that Cruise is the latestrobotaxi company selecting NVIDIA DRIVE, following announcements by Amazon Zoox, DiDi (DIDI), Oxbotica, Pony.ai and AutoX.
- Announced thatVolvo Cars will use NVIDIA DRIVE Orin™ to power the autonomous driving computer in its next-generation cars, beginning with the XC90, to be revealed in 2022.
- Announced that theNVIDIA DRIVE platformpowers MBUX Hyperscreen, the AI cockpit in Mercedes-Benz’s new EQS sedan.
- Announced that TuSimple and Navistar will buildself-driving trucks powered by the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX™ platform, and the self-driving truck companyPlus will use NVIDIA DRIVE Orinfor its upcoming autonomous vehicle platform.