Nvidia is closing in on a $100 billion revenue quarter

Nvidia is getting ready to join the narrow club of companies that earn more than $100 billion in a single quarter. By its own forecast, its revenue will reach $108 billion in the coming months. Before it, only Amazon, Apple and Alphabet had cleared that bar, and each of them more than once.

The cause for optimism is the latest earnings report. Over the past quarter Nvidia took in a record $96.2 billion in total revenue — more than $10 billion higher than the quarter before. Year over year the figure doubled. Profit also more than doubled, to $59.7 billion.

It all rests on data centers

The main engine remains the business of supplying chips for data centers: this revenue alone more than doubled over the year, reaching a record $89 billion. It is precisely the demand for AI computing power that is driving the company's rapid growth.

Against that backdrop, the consumer side looks modest. The “edge computing” category, which also includes gaming graphics cards, brought in just $7.2 billion. On paper that is a 27% gain year over year, but Nvidia acknowledged that consumer PC sales had slowed because of high prices for memory and prebuilt systems. The component shortage keeps pushing up the cost of gaming GPUs. What's more, on the eve of the report the company also warned of coming price increases for its AI chips.

Nvidia thus presents a curious contrast: while its corporate business is setting records on the wave of AI demand, ordinary graphics-card buyers are running into shortages and rising prices. The company's real money today comes not from gamers but from data-center operators.

Source: The Verge