GPU giant Nvidia posted revenues of $2.91bn in Q4, bringing its annual earnings to $9.71bn. The near-$10bn figure is a record for the graphics card maker – 41% higher than last year’s figure of $6.91bn.
Nvidia put its record revenue report down to surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI) computation, virtual money mining and autonomous vehicle platforms.
Cryptocurrency mining, gaming and demand for high performance computing in the data centre have all fuelled the graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer’s success. The California-based firm earned more than $50m over the odds in its second highest-earning segment, data centres.
The company’s shares shot up by 14% in the wake of its financial results, which beat investors’ expectations, CNBC reported.
“Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations,” Reuters reported Nvidia CFO Colette Kress as saying on a conference call.
“While the overall contribution of cryptocurrency to our business remains difficult to quantify, we believe it was a higher percentage of revenue than the prior quarter.”
GPU business revenue was $2.46bn, up 33% from the previous year. Company executives attributed this to growth in the Pascal generation of GPUs, owing to demand for new games and virtual currency mining. Nvidia said strong sales of Volta architecture and high performance computing design innovations bolstered its record datacentre revenue, which came in at $606, up 105% year on year.
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Kress confirmed revenue for Tegra, Nvidia’s system on a chip (SoC) for smartphones and digital assistants, saw a revenue increase of 86% from last year at $1.53bn in 2018.
In November, Nvidia released its Tesla V100 GPU for AI and high performance computing (HPC) for cloud services in the data centre. The firm also shook hands on partnerships in artificial intelligence with GE Health and Baker Hughes (GE) in oil and gas earlier in the quarter.
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“We achieved another record quarter, capping an excellent year,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia. “Industries around the world are racing to incorporate AI. Virtually every internet and cloud service provider has embraced our Volta GPUs.”
Huang confirmed the company is looking to develop supercomputer cluster technology to boost machine learning speeds for AI computations.
Kress confirmed the company expects to bring in $2.9bn (plus or minus 2%) revenue in the next financial quarter.
