Nvidia reported record revenues on Thursday for its gaming and data center products for both its previous quarter and full fiscal year. Auto revenues were down, however.
Overall revenues in the fourth fiscal quarter ending January 31, 2021, were $5 billion, up 61% from the prior year. Net income was up 53% from the prior year. The full fiscal 2021 brought in $16.68 billion, up 53% from a year earlier.
Shares closed Thursday at 579.96, up by 2.52%, then dropped to 557.90 hours later.
The after-hours decline was blamed on a comment made by CEO Jensen Huang during the earning call in which he said he did not expect the company’s business of selling Cryptocurrency Mining Processors (CMPs) to cryptocurrency miners to “grow extremely large,” according to CNBC. “We expect that to be a small part of our business as we go forward.”
Nonetheless. Nvidia beat analyst expectations for both earnings and revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter, even amid a global chip shortage.
“This year was extraordinary,” Huang told analysts, according to a Motley Fool transcript. “The pandemic will pass, but the world has been changed forever. Technology adoption is accelerating across every industry. Companies and products need to be more remote and autonomous. This will drive data centers, AI, and robotics. This underlies the accelerated adoption of Nvidia’s technology.”
Huang said Nvidia’s A100 universal AI data center GPUs are part of the overall data center success. The A100s are “ramping strongly” to cloud service providers and vertical industries that are creating AI services, he said.
Fourth quarter data center revenue was a record $1.9 billion, while full year revenue was a record $6.7 billion, up 124%.
In gaming, fourth quarter revenue was a record $2.5 billion, while full-year revenue was a record $7.76 billion, up 41%. Nvidia launched GeForce RTX 30 series laptop GPUs used in more than 70 new laptops for gamers and designers.
Automotive was a soft spot, with fourth quarter revenue reaching $145 million, down 11% from a year earlier. Full-year revenue was $536 million, down 23%.
Nvidia has paired with electric vehicle makers SAIC and Nio and robotaxi-maker Zoox and cabless truck-maker Einride with its Nvidia Drive autonomous driving technology. The company claimed that its software-defined Drive platform is the “only solution that spans from the data center for training deep neural nets and running physically accurate simulations to a full stack in car solutions, scaling from ADAS to level 5 fully autonomous functionality.”
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress also reported on the call that the acquisition of Arm from SoftBank Group is “moving forward as expected,” including with “constructive dialog” with regulators in the U.S., U.K., EU, and China, among others.
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She re-committed to maintaining Arm’s open licensing model as well. “We are on the cusp of a new age in which AI fuels industries ranging from healthcare to scientific research to the environment,” Kress said. “With this transaction, our vision is to boost Arm’s potential so it can thrive in this era and grow into promising markets.”
Kress forecast revenue for the current quarter will reach $5.3 billion.