Nvidia has announced its latest set of quarterly financials. The graphics chip company reported record revenue for the quarter ended 26th July 2020, which its bean counters refer to as Q2 FY 2021. A total of $3.87 billion was brought in during the three month period, up an impressive 50 per cent YoY. Much of this success was due to Nvidia's data centre business performance which generated revenue of $1.75 billion, up 167 per cent YoY.
"Adoption of Nvidia computing is accelerating, driving record revenue and exceptional growth," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, summed up in a statement. "Growth in GeForce gaming accelerated as gamers increasingly immerse themselves in realistic virtual worlds created by Nvidia RTX ray tracing and AI. Our new Ampere GPU architecture is sprinting out of the blocks, with the world’s top cloud service providers and server makers moving quickly to offer Nvidia accelerated computing."
Earlier today you might have read about Apple's exceptional performance during these pandemic afflicted months. Nvidia has prospered too but the picture is a little more complicated. Huang said that while the pandemic had a measurably negative impact on both professional visualization and automotive businesses - gaming, AI, cloud computing and autonomous machines all fared very well.
So, Nvidia's data centre business caught up and surpassed its gaming segment at last. In Q2 data centre generated $1.75 billion, compared to $1.65 billion for gaming and both were pleasing performers for the green team (up 167 per cent and 26 per cent YoY, respectively). In data centre Nvidia completed the acquisition of Mellanox which in turn contributed 14 per cent of company revenue. Elsewhere in the data centre business the A100 Tensor Core GPU gained traction.
Nvidia partners released 100+ new GeForce powered laptops for students, creators and gamers. GeForce Now arrived on Chromebooks, and Square Enix announced that it would allow access to its extensive catalogue via GeForce Now.
H2 2020 will be big for gaming
In the post-results conference call Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave investors some insight into his expectations for the remainder of the year. Even a casual PC tech news watcher is probably well aware that Nvidia (and AMD) is going to launch its latest and greatest consumer cards in the coming months. In Nvidia's case, the firm made a news splash by beginning the #UltimateCountdown to a special GeForce event on 1st September. It is widely expected that the next top-end GeForce cards will be announced on this date. Already we are seeing leaks of GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards start to pile up.
Nvidia is "expecting a really large second half for gaming," Huang teased investors.
