NVIDIA today reported revenue for the third quarter ended Oct. 28, 2018, of $3.18 billion, up 21 percent from $2.64 billion a year earlier, and up 2 percent from $3.12 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.97, up 48 percent from $1.33 a year ago and up 12 percent from $1.76 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.84, up 38 percent from $1.33 a year earlier and down 5 percent from $1.94 in the previous quarter.

"AI is advancing at an incredible pace across the world, driving record revenues for our datacenter platforms," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Our introduction of Turing GPUs is a giant leap for computer graphics and AI, bringing the magic of real-time ray tracing to games and the biggest generational performance improvements we have ever delivered."Our near-term results reflect excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom, which will be corrected. Our market position and growth opportunities are stronger than ever. During the quarter, we launched new platforms to extend our architecture into new growth markets - RAPIDS for machine learning, RTX Server for film rendering, and the T4 Cloud GPU for hyperscale and cloud."

Capital Return
During the first nine months of fiscal 2019, NVIDIA returned $1.13 billion to shareholders through a combination of $855 million in share repurchases and $273 million in quarterly cash dividends.

In November 2018, the board of directors authorized an additional $7 billion under the company's share repurchase program for a total of $7.94 billion available through the end of December 2022.

NVIDIA announced a 7 percent increase in its quarterly cash dividend to $0.16 per share from $0.15 per share, to be paid with its next quarterly cash dividend on December 21, 2018, to all shareholders of record on November 30, 2018.

NVIDIA intends to return an additional $3 billion to shareholders by the end of fiscal 2020, which may begin in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019.

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

• Revenue is expected to be $2.70 billion, plus or minus 2 percent.
• GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 62.3 percent and 62.5 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points.
• GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $915 million and $755 million, respectively.
• GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are both expected to be income of approximately $21 million.
• GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are both expected to be 8 percent, plus or minus 1 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.

Third Quarter Fiscal 2019 Highlights
Since its second quarter earnings release, NVIDIA has achieved progress in these areas:

Company-wide

• Launched the revolutionary NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture, with new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing.
• Drew nearly 13,000 attendees to GPU Technology Conferences in Munich, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Washington, following events in San Jose and Taipei. The company expects 30,000 total GTC attendees this year, up more than 30 percent from 2017.

Datacenter

• Announced that the new TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers shows a 48 percent jump over last year in the number of systems using NVIDIA GPU accelerators, climbing to 127, including the fastest in the world, No. 1 in the U.S., No. 1 in Europe and No. 1 in Japan.
• Introduced RAPIDS , an open-source GPU-acceleration platform for data science and machine learning, with broad adoption from industry leaders including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Oracle and SAP.
• Launched the NVIDIA T4 Cloud GPU and NVIDIA TensorRT Hyperscale Inference Platform to deliver advanced acceleration for voice, video, image and recommendation services in hyperscale datacenters. Within the first two months of its launch, the T4 received the fastest adoption of any server GPU, featuring in 57 separate designs from leading computer makers, and availability on Google Cloud Platform.
• Launched the NVIDIA RTX Server, opening a new market to GPUs for photo-real rendering in the datacenter.
• Unveiled the NVIDIA Clara platform, which brings AI to the next generation of medical instruments as a powerful tool for early detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease.

Gaming

• Released the GeForce RTX series, the first gaming GPUs based on the Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform, which fuses next-generation shaders with real-time ray tracing and new AI capabilities, including Deep Learning Super-Sampling anti-aliasing.

Professional Visualization

• Unveiled the Quadro RTX series, which is designed to revolutionize the workflow of millions of designers and artists on the desktop.

Automotive

• Announced NVIDIA's first Level-2 autopilot design wins with Toyota, Volvo Cars and Isuzu Motors.
• Announced that Continental and Veoneer, leading tier-1 suppliers, have each selected DRIVE AGX Xavier to power self-driving solutions to be offered early in the 2020s.
• Announced the start of production of Xavier , the world's first single-chip autopilot SOC, and started shipping the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Xavier developer kit.
• Published NVIDIA's Self-Driving Safety Report, detailing the company's development processes and four fundamental pillars of safe autonomous driving.

Edge AI

• Announced global availability of the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit, with leading Japanese companies among the first to adopt the platform.
• Announced that Yamaha Motor Co. will use NVIDIA to power its upcoming lineup of autonomous machines.