NVIDIA has unveiled its quarterly earnings and it reports $5 billion sales earnings for the first time in the fourth quarter of a year. NVIDIA cites holiday gaming-chip demand and renewed interest in cryptocurrency mining as the reasons for such huge sales in the fourth quarter of 2020.
NVIDIA reported its fourth-quarter earnings in a press conference yesterday. NVIDIA says that the gaming sales in the last quarter surged 67% to a huge $2.5 billion, which is a new company record. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has hailed the gaming demand as ‘Incredible’.
However, NVIDIA also had some bad news to share, especially for gamers. Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer said that the gaming graphic card supply shortage will likely stay until the start of the 2nd quarter of this year. In the conference call, she said:
The entire 30-series lineup has been hard to keep in stock and we exited Q4 with channel inventories even lower than when we started. Although we are increasing supply, channel inventories will likely remain low throughout Q1.
NVIDIA also discussed its newly announced CMP cards which have been specially made for mining. Collette Kress said that the company is expected around $50 million from CMP card sales and that it has more plans to break out cryptocurrency-related sales in the future.
Coming to the data-center side, NVIDIA doubled its sales from last year, selling $1.9 billion worth of items. Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the following about it.
Our A100 universal AI data-center GPUs are ramping strongly across cloud-service providers and vertical industries. Thousands of companies across the world are applying Nvidia AI to create cloud-connected products with AI services that will transform the world’s largest industries. We are seeing the smartphone moment for every industry.
You’re going to see smart lawnmowers, smart tractors, smart air conditioners, smart elevators, smart buildings, smart warehouses, robotic retail stores, entire store — the entire retail store is like a robot. And they will all have the autonomous capability; they’ll all be driven by AI.
For the first quarter of 2021, NVIDIA forecast revenue of $5.19 billion to $5.41 billion, while analysts had forecast revenue of $4.49 billion on average.
