Growth across most platforms. Revenues up in all segments. NVIDIA had a killer first quarter.
NVIDIA’s primary business of designing and selling GPUs is up 77 percent from last year at this time, and up 13 percent from last quarter. The company’s Tegra processor revenue went up to USD$442 million, a 33 percent increase from last year.
The majority of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from the gaming market, and with reported revenue of USD$1.72 billion, the company is up 68 percent from last year, though they are down 1 percent from last quarter. Datacenter revenue went up 71 percent since last year and was up 16 percent from last quarter. NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 instances are now available from Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Microsoft joins a big-tech pack of cloud providers that includes IBM, Oracle and Amazon among their ranks. Google Cloud is on its way, having recently announced that the Tesla V100 is available in beta only.
Along with datacenter growth, visualization revenue rose USD$251 million since last year, making it a 22 percent increase. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality along with a growing demand for real-time rendering drove this growth of NVIDIA’s visualization products and services. NVIDIA’s automotive revenue also grew 4 percent to USD$145 million and introduced NVIDIA Drive Constellation, a platform to help companies and manufacturers among others improve autonomous vehicle driving systems.
Bottom Line
NVIDIA continues an impressive growth streak propelled largely by their GeForce GPUs for the gaming market, but crucially, NVIDIA was way ahead of the curve when anticipating the GPU as the new brain of sophisticated deep learning processes and services. The Tesla V100 instances that power cloud computing services from the biggest tech companies on the planet will continue to grow, which helps reduce the drag felt by a PC market that continues to slow down.
The fact that NVIDIA is producing the hardware powering the AI revolution is a good sign of continuing growth, especially for its datacenter business. A new GPU from NVIDIA will be out by the third quarter of this year—the hits will keep on coming as long as NVIDIA doesn’t lose focus and let AMD catch them off guard.