NVIDIA Rocks Fiscal Q1 Earnings With Record Revenue On GPU Sales Surge

There are a lot of companies that would be thrilled to report $1.94 billion in revenue for a quarter. And exactly a year ago, that's what NVIDIA did. But that was then and this is now, and for the GPU maker's first quarter ended April 29, 2018, NVIDIA saw its revenue shoot up 66 percent to $3.21, marking the best quarter the company has ever had. That led to a profit of $1.28 billion, up 141 percent from a year ago. Clearly its business strategies are paying off.

Part of that includes diversifying into more markets, with an especially strong push into artificial intelligence. It's a fast growing field, and NVIDIA is trying to be at the forefront as more and more companies adopt AI technologies.

"We had a strong quarter with growth across every platform," said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "Our datacenter business achieved another record and gaming remained strong. At the heart of our opportunity is the incredible growth of computing demand of AI, just as traditional computing has slowed. The GPU computing approach we have pioneered is ideal for filling this vacuum. And our invention of the Tensor Core GPU has further enhanced our strong position to power the AI era."

Related to that, NVIDIA's Tegra processor business went up 33 percent compared to last year, generating $442 million for the company. What's really impressive, though, is that NVIDIA is saw growth in each of its market platforms, including Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter, Automotive, and OEM and IP.

If you're a gamer, there's no need to fret over NVIDIA targeting other markets. Gaming is still the company's bread and butter—gaming revenue tallied more than $1.7 billion for the quarter, and while that is down a tick from last quarter (1 percent), it's up a whopping 68 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. NVIDIA generated more revenue from gaming than all of its other market segments combined.
That might not always have been obvious with the previous shortage, due in part to cryptocurrency mining, though also the high cost of memory. However, NVIDIA has been working its suppliers, hardware partners, and retailers to get cards into the hands of gamers, and just recently the company trumpeted the return of most SKUs to MSRP levels. Sure, we'd like to see prices dip below MSRP at this stage in the game for Pascal, but given how things were trending, it's nice to see cards finally come down from where they were.

That said, it hasn't been all roses and rainbows for NVIDIA. The company came under fire for an affiliate program that would provided certain perks to hardware partners in exchange for aligning their gaming brands with GeForce. The program came under scrutiny in the media, and NVIDIA ultimately decided to pull the plug rather than battle what it perceived to be "misinformation."

It's all in the rear view mirror now. Looking ahead, NVIDIA expects revenue to dip slightly to $3.1 billion next quarter, plus or minus two percent. And while NVIDIA didn't mention anything about its next generation GPUs, we suspect an announcement is coming soon.