NVIDIA today reported revenue for the second quarter ended July 29, 2018, of $3.12 billion, up 40 percent from $2.23 billion a year earlier, and down 3 percent from $3.21 billion in the previous quarter.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.76, up 91 percent from $0.92 a year ago and down 11 percent from $1.98 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.94, up 92 percent from $1.01 a year earlier and down 5 percent from $2.05 in the previous quarter.

"Growth across every platform - AI, Gaming, Professional Visualization, self-driving cars - drove another great quarter," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Fueling our growth is the widening gap between demand for computing across every industry and the limits reached by traditional computing. Developers are jumping on the GPU-accelerated computing model that we pioneered for the boost they need."We announced Turing this week. Turing is the world's first ray-tracing GPU and completes the NVIDIA RTX platform, realizing a 40-year dream of the computer graphics industry. Turing is a giant leap forward and the greatest advance for computing since we introduced CUDA over a decade ago."

Capital Return
During the first half of fiscal 2019, NVIDIA returned $837 million to shareholders through a combination of $655 million in share repurchases and $182 million in quarterly cash dividends.

For fiscal 2019, NVIDIA intends to return $1.25 billion to shareholders through ongoing quarterly cash dividends and share repurchases.

NVIDIA will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.15 per share on September 21, 2018, to all shareholders of record on August 30, 2018.

NVIDIA's outlook for the third quarter of fiscal 2019 is as follows:

• Revenue is expected to be $3.25 billion, plus or minus two percent.
• GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 62.6 percent and 62.8 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points.
• GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $870 million and $730 million, respectively.
• GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are both expected to be income of approximately $20 million.
• GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are both expected to be 9 percent, plus or minus one percent, excluding any discrete items. GAAP discrete items include excess tax benefits or deficiencies related to stock-based compensation, which are expected to generate variability on a quarter by quarter basis.

Recent Highlights
This week, NVIDIA reinvented computer graphics with the launch of its Turing GPU architecture, the company's most important innovation since the invention of the CUDA GPU more than a decade ago. Turing is the world's first ray-tracing GPU. It features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing -- which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible - as well as more powerful compute for simulation and enhanced rasterization. Turing completes the NVIDIA RTX platform, a new hybrid rendering graphics approach that combines rasterization, ray tracing, compute and AI to enable real-time ray tracing, the Holy Grail of computer graphics. Turing will reset the look of video games and open up the $250 billion visual effects industry to GPUs.

NVIDIA Research continues to push the possibilities of AI with deep learning inventions such as a new technique that produces high-quality slow-motion video from standard slow-motion video; a new technique that cleans up grainy or pixelated photos simply by looking at corrupted photos; and a new method to train robots to carry out actions by observing human activity. Its work received four honors at the recent Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. It also received a $23 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to work with a team of university and industry researchers to develop post-Moore's law systems.

Other highlights of each market platform since the first quarter earnings release include:

Datacenter

• Grew Datacenter revenue by 83 percent from a year earlier to $760 million.
• Marked the launch of Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, powered by more than 27,000 NVIDIA Volta Tensor Core GPUs.
• Announced that five of the world's seven fastest supercomputers are powered by NVIDIA GPUs, based on the new list of the world's 500 fastest systems. NVIDIA GPUs provide 56 percent of the list's new computing power.
• Introduced NVIDIA HGX-2 , the first unified computing platform for both AI and high performance computing. A number of partners around the world, including cloud service providers, server OEMs and ODMs, are building systems incorporating HGX-2.
• Google Cloud integrated into its offerings the NVIDIA Tesla P4 GPU optimized for AI inference and graphics virtualization.
• Researchers at Fast.ai achieved the fastest-ever AI training time using NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs available on Amazon Web Services.
• Launched AIRI Mini with Pure Storage and ONTAP AI with NetApp, providing enterprises with an easy-to-deploy, modular approach for implementing and scaling deep learning.

Gaming

• Grew Gaming revenue by 52 percent from a year earlier to $1.80 billion.
• Announced there are more than 25 Max-Q GeForce gaming notebook designs offered by all major OEMs, enabling high-end performance for thin and light notebooks.
• Next-generation NVIDIA G-SYNC HDR displays began shipping, delivering stunning 1,000 NIT HDR, stutter-free gaming.

Professional Visualization

• Grew Professional Visualization revenue by 20 percent from a year earlier to $281 million.
• Unveiled its first Turing-based GPUs -- NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000 -- which will revolutionize the craft of some 50 million designers and artists.
• Introduced the NVIDIA RTX Server, a full ray-tracing global illumination rendering server that will give a giant boost for the world's render farms as Moore's law ends.
• Announced broad industry support for the NVIDIA RTX platform from the world's top graphics software companies.

Automotive

• Grew Automotive revenue by 13 percent from a year earlier to $161 million.
• Announced that Daimler and Bosch have selected NVIDIA's DRIVE platform to bring fully automated and driverless vehicles to city streets, with pilot testing to begin next year in Silicon Valley.