Pascal GPUs Help NVIDIA Crush Q4 Earnings, Datacenter And AI Units Show Surging Growth

Things are definitely looking good over in NVIDIA land these days. Yesterday afternoon, the company announced its fiscal Q4 2017 and full-year fiscal 2017 earnings and the results were quite impressive. Revenue for the quarter shot up 55 percent to $2.17 billion compared to the same period a year ago. Likewise, full-year revenue rose 38 percent year-over-year to $6.91 billion.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were reported at $1.13 compared to just $0.52 a year earlier, while the full-year metric was $3.06, representing an 83 percent increase. Nearly all of NVIDIA’s business sectors witnessed growth during the quarter, with Gaming revenue increasing 66 percent to $1.35 billion and the increasingly important Automotive sector increasing 38 percent to $128 million. However, the Datacenter division saw the biggest year-over-year growth, increasing 205 percent to $296 million.

So, what’s going on at NVIDIA to cause such strong year-over-year gains? Well, during 2016 NVIDIA made a top-to-bottom revamp of its GPU lineup with the release of the widely lauded Pascal architecture. Available for both mobile and desktop platforms, Pascal GPUs have ushered in new wave affordable VR-ready graphics cards for customers.

However, NVIDIA GPUs are also widely used for deep learning, and as such, its Tesla family has also contributed greatly to the company’s bottom line.  “Deep learning on NVIDIA GPUs, a breakthrough approach to AI, is helping to tackle challenges such as self-driving cars, early cancer detection and weather prediction,” said NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang. “We can now see that GPU-based deep learning will revolutionize major industries, from consumer internet and transportation to health care and manufacturing. The era of AI is upon us.”

During Q4, NVIDIA launched a bevy of products including the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 TI, a new SHIELD TV and the GeForce NOW Pascal GPU game streaming service. Other highlights included the arrival of Quadro GP100 GPU for the professional visualization market. NVIDIA also made inroads in the automotive market with key partnerships reached with Mercedes-Benz and Audi using the DRIVE PX 2 AI platform for self-driving capabilities.

We should also mention that NVDA is trading up 360 percent over the past twelve months...