NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Third Quarter Fiscal 2021

[btarunr]

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported record revenue for the third quarter ended October 25, 2020, of $4.73 billion, up 57 percent from $3.01 billion a year earlier, and up 22 percent from $3.87 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $2.12, up 46 percent from $1.45 a year ago, and up 114 percent from $0.99 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $2.91, up 63 percent from $1.78 a year earlier, and up 33 percent from $2.18 in the previous quarter.

"NVIDIA is firing on all cylinders, achieving record revenues in Gaming, Data Center and overall," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU provides our largest-ever generational leap and demand is overwhelming. NVIDIA RTX has made raytracing the new standard in gaming. "We are continuing to raise the bar with NVIDIA AI. Our A100 compute platform is ramping fast, with the top cloud companies deploying it globally. We swept the industry AI inference benchmark, and our customers are moving some of the world's most popular AI services into production, powered by NVIDIA technology.



"We announced the NVIDIA DPU programmable data center processor, and the planned acquisition of Arm, creator of the world's most popular CPU. We are positioning NVIDIA for the age of AI, when computing will extend from the cloud to trillions of devices."

NVIDIA paid $99 million in quarterly cash dividends in the third quarter. It will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.16 per share on December 29, 2020, to all shareholders of record on December 4, 2020.

NVIDIA's outlook for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021 is as follows:

• Revenue is expected to be $4.80 billion, plus or minus 2 percent.
• GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 62.8 percent and 65.5 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points.
• GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $1.64 billion and $1.18 billion, respectively.
• GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are both expected to be an expense of approximately $55 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.

Highlights
During the third quarter, NVIDIA announced a definitive agreement to acquire Arm Limited from SoftBank Capital Limited and SVF Holdco (UK) Limited in a transaction valued at $40 billion. The transaction will combine NVIDIA's leading AI computing platform with Arm's vast ecosystem to create the premier computing company for the age of AI. The transaction - which is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin and non-GAAP earnings per share - is expected to close in the first quarter of calendar 2022.

NVIDIA also announced plans to build a world-class AI lab in Cambridge, England - including a powerful AI supercomputer based on NVIDIA and Arm technology - and provide research fellowships and partnerships with local institutions and AI training courses. Separately, it plans to build Cambridge-1, the U.K.'s most powerful AI supercomputer, based on an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system and designed for AI research in healthcare and drug discovery.

NVIDIA also achieved progress since its previous earnings announcement in these areas:

Data Center

• Third-quarter revenue was a record $1.90 billion, up 8 percent from the previous quarter and up 162 percent from a year earlier.
• Shared news that Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure announced general availability of cloud computing instances based on the NVIDIA A100 GPU, following Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
• Announced the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD Solution for Enterprise - the world's first turnkey AI infrastructure - which is expected to be installed by yearend in Korea, the U.K., India and Sweden.
• Announced that five supercomputers backed by EuroHPC - including "Leonardo," the world's fastest AI supercomputer built by the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA - will use NVIDIA's data center accelerators or networking.
• Introduced the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU (data processing unit) - supported by NVIDIA DOCA, a novel data-center-infrastructure-on-a-chip architecture - to bring breakthrough networking, storage and security performance to every data center.
• Announced a broad partnership with VMware to create an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI and a new architecture for data center, cloud and edge using NVIDIA DPUs, benefiting 300,000-plus VMware customers.
• Unveiled NVIDIA Maxine, an AI video-streaming platform that enhances streaming quality and offers such AI-powered features as gaze correction, super-resolution, noise cancellation and face relighting.
• Introduced the NVIDIA RTX A6000 and NVIDIA A40 GPUs, built on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture and featuring new RT Cores, Tensor Cores and CUDA cores.
• Extended its lead on MLPerf performance benchmarks for inference, winning every test across all six application areas for data center and edge computing systems.
• Announced a partnership with GSK to integrate computing platforms for imaging, genomics and AI into the drug and vaccine discovery process.
• Introduced at SC20, three powerful advances in AI technology: the NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPU, powering the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform with twice the memory of its predecessor; the NVIDIA DGX Station A100, the world's only petascale workgroup server, for machine learning and data science workloads; and the next generation of NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand, for the fastest networking performance.

Gaming

• Third-quarter revenue was a record $2.27 billion, up 37 percent from the previous quarter and up 37 percent from a year earlier.
• Unveiled the GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs, powered by the NVIDIA Ampere architecture and the second generation of RTX, with up to 2x the performance of the previous Turing-based generation.
• Announced that Fortnite - the world's most popular video game - will support NVIDIA RTX real-time raytracing and DLSS AI super-resolution, joining more than two dozen other titles including Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Watch Dogs: Legion.
• Introduced NVIDIA Reflex, a suite of technologies that improves reaction time in games by reducing system latency, which is available in Fortnite, Valorant, Call of Duty: Warzone and Apex Legends, among other titles.
• Unveiled NVIDIA Broadcast, a plugin that enhances microphone, speaker and webcam quality with RTX-accelerated AI effects.

Professional Visualization

• Third-quarter revenue was $236 million, up 16 percent from the previous quarter and down 27 percent from a year earlier.
• Brought to open beta NVIDIA Omniverse, the world's first NVIDIA RTX-based 3D simulation and collaboration platform.
• Announced NVIDIA Omniverse Machinima, enabling creators with video game assets animated by NVIDIA AI technologies.
• Collaborated with Adobe to bring GPU-accelerated neural filters to Adobe Photoshop AI-powered tools.

Automotive

• Third-quarter revenue was $125 million, up 13 percent from the previous quarter and down 23 percent from a year earlier.
• Announced with Mercedes-Benz that NVIDIA is powering the next-generation MBUX AI cockpit system, to be featured first in the new S-class sedan, with such features as an augmented reality heads-up display, AI voice assistant and interactive graphics.
• Announced with Hyundai Motor Group that the Korean automaker's entire lineup of Hyundai, Kia and Genesis models will come standard with NVIDIA DRIVE in-vehicle infotainment systems, starting in 2022.
• Announced that China's Li Auto will develop its next generation of electric vehicles using NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, a software-defined platform for autonomous vehicles.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[nguyen]

Seems like Ampere is earning Nvidia so much money despite poor availability like many people have claimed ? it's like they are printing money there.

 

[Bubster]

On Wednesday, the company said that both its gaming and data center divisions have also been boosted during the Covid-19 pandemic as customers need computers to work and play from home.

Nvidia said it set company records for revenue and quarterly profit and that revenue was up 57% from the same period last year.

Nvidia’s big quarter was driven by its compute and networking segment, which was up 146% from a year ago to $1.94 billion. It was also boosted by the company’s graphics segment, which was up 25% from last year to $2.79 billion. In addition to reporting revenue in terms of those two segments, Nvidia also discloses revenue by which market the products are intended for.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company is expecting a strong half of the year in its gaming division. During the quarter, Nvidia revealed its new line of graphics cards based on a new technology it calls Ampere, and interest was strong. One of the new models, the GeForce RTX 3080, went on sale in September and immediately sold out.

Revenue in the gaming market was up 37% from last year to $2.27 billion, which the company called a record and attributed to sales of graphics cards to computer and console makers, and said that desktop sales benefitted from the launch of its new RTX graphics cards.

On Wednesday, the company said that both its gaming and data center divisions have also been boosted during the Covid-19 pandemic as customers need computers to work and play from home.

 

[Steevo]

Seems like Ampere is earning Nvidia so much money despite poor availability like many people have claimed ? it's like they are printing money there.

Its the few bucks they saved going with Samsungs foundry VS TSMC for better power/performance. And the leadership in moving the software support forward VS AMD and open source kinda.

 

[nguyen]

Its the few bucks they saved going with Samsungs foundry VS TSMC for better power/performance. And the leadership in moving the software support forward VS AMD and open source kinda.

Plus Nvidia have the entire Samsung 8N capacity to themselves, printing money has never been that fast had Nvidia went with TSMC 7nm .

 

[Ashtr1x]

It's always funny to see how people say Samsung 8N is garbage vs the almighty TSMC 7N as if Ampere GA10x on 7N would be somehow faster than the 8N designs. Ngreedia, the industry leader is trying to save some "pennies" "few bucks", on the Samsung process node and are dumb to not know how the 8N even works, when the process itself was made specifically for NV, probably they are too dumb right ?

Also GA100 is one 7N only for the folks who do not know, just like how AMD is using the defunct GloFo 12nm/14nm for the I/O die on the Client and Servers respectively and CCD on 7N, probably saving pennies too since Zen2 & latest Zen 3 which makes the fastest 5950X, and upcoming MIlan as well, Out of the window goes - yield, economy of scale, margin, supply, partnership & Marketing too, like leading edge node to market, "5nm" "World's Fastest Core" "Faster than 98% of laptops"

 

[Vya Domus]

It's always funny to see how people say Samsung 8N is garbage vs the almighty TSMC 7N as if Ampere GA10x on 7N would be somehow faster than the 8N designs. Ngreedia, the industry leader is trying to save some "pennies" "few bucks", on the Samsung process node and are dumb to not know how the 8N even works, when the process itself was made specifically for NV, probably they are too dumb right ?

Faster, probably not by much, but it would have been a lot more power efficient. And yes, they have literally saved a few bucks per chip, you can use a wafer calculator and look up estimated prices for TSMC and Samsung and see for yourself. Of course all of this seems dumb and a mystery to people who don't anything about this, I don't blame you for believing that.

But then what's the alternative ? Say Samsung's node is fucking amazing as you think it is, the massive gap in efficiency between them and AMD must be explained somehow and the only other explanation is that instead of the node being garbage their architecture is garbage.

And by the way the "process made specifically for Nvidia" is actually the high performance version of Samsung's 8nm node, the same way 12nm was just TSMC's 16nm.

 

[stimpy88]

Just think of how much money they are leaving on the table due to their deal with Samsung and their vastly inferior manufacturing process, with low yields too boot! Oh and their arrogance at trying to strongarm TSMC! Boy oh boy did they drop the ball with that one!

I'd be pissed if I had a stake in this company.

 

[nguyen]

Just think of how much money they are leaving on the table due to their deal with Samsung and their vastly inferior manufacturing process, with low yields too boot! Oh and their arrogance at trying to strongarm TSMC! Boy oh boy did they drop the ball with that one!

I'd be pissed if I had a stake in this company.

I see nothing wrong with supporting another player in the foundry business, people are supporting AMD for the same reason. Both Nvidia and Samsung are reaping rewards for their co-operation, this will force TSMC to cut wafer prices that benefit everyone.

 

[PerfectWave]

Its the few bucks they saved going with Samsungs foundry VS TSMC for better power/performance. And the leadership in moving the software support forward VS AMD and open source kinda.

Their only choice was going with Samsung. No space for them to go with TSMC

 

[sith'ari]

I see nothing wrong with supporting another player in the foundry business, people are supporting AMD for the same reason. Both Nvidia and Samsung are reaping rewards for their co-operation, this will force TSMC to cut wafer prices that benefit everyone.

EXACTLY THAT !!!
I always find it amusing watching people ,or even tech-analysts/reviewers stating how much competition is needed ,which in the end benefits the consumers. But ,for some reason , their arguments seem to focus only to GPU/CPU designers.
When it comes to manufacturers/foundries ,where right now there is a HUGE TSMC dominance , which could even be considered as close to a monopoly , no one from those people seem to care , and they are even blaming nVIDIA for working with Samsung ,which ultimately ,this could lead to an alternative solution Vs this close-to-monopoly manufacturing status that we have right now!!!
For many people ,only nVIDIA 's monopoly(oligopoly actually) seems to bother them , while on the other hand ,TSMC 's even greater monopoly(oligopoly actually) doesn't seem to be of anyone's concern !!!
ohh , the irony.
(I'm glad that there are few people who notice it though)

 

[stimpy88]

I see nothing wrong with supporting another player in the foundry business, people are supporting AMD for the same reason. Both Nvidia and Samsung are reaping rewards for their co-operation, this will force TSMC to cut wafer prices that benefit everyone.

EXACTLY THAT !!!
I always find it amusing watching people ,or even tech-analysts/reviewers stating how much competition is needed ,which in the end benefits the consumers. But ,for some reason , their arguments seem to focus only to GPU/CPU designers.
When it comes to manufacturers/foundries ,where right now there is a HUGE TSMC dominance , which could even be considered as close to a monopoly , no one from those people seem to care , and they are even blaming nVIDIA for working with Samsung ,which ultimately ,this could lead to an alternative solution Vs this close-to-monopoly manufacturing status that we have right now!!!
For many people ,only nVIDIA 's monopoly(oligopoly actually) seems to bother them , while on the other hand ,TSMC 's even greater monopoly(oligopoly actually) doesn't seem to be of anyone's concern !!!
ohh , the irony.
(I'm glad that there are few people who notice it though)

It's amazing how many people don't follow the news, even when it has been published on this site!

Samsung have massive yield issues, and TSMC would not do business with nVidia due to them demanding a discount, forcing nVidia to go with Samsung.

And to be clear, TSMC needs competition, but Samsung is hardly it, at least at the moment. It's a shame, and hopefully Samsung will improve their process tech, and yield issues. That will be to the benefit of us, the customers, as it's obvious to see right now, TSMC simply cannot cope with the incredible demand placed upon them, which is why we can't buy Xboxes, PlayStations, AMD CPU's, nVidia GPUs and now AMD GPUs.

 

[Vya Domus]

Samsung can't even compete with TSMC in low power nodes for mobile SoCs but they can for high performance nodes in desktop chips ?

Right.

 

[Fluffmeister]

Their only choice was going with Samsung. No space for them to go with TSMC

Not quite, the A100 is built by TSMC.

Beyond that, Nvidia seem to be doing okay.

 

[sith'ari]

It's amazing how many people don't follow the news, even when it has been published on this site!

Samsung have massive yield issues, and TSMC would not do business with nVidia due to them demanding a discount, forcing nVidia to go with Samsung.

And to be clear, TSMC needs competition, but Samsung is hardly it, at least at the moment. It's a shame, and hopefully Samsung will improve their process tech, and yield issues. That will be to the benefit of us, the customers, as it's obvious to see right now, TSMC simply cannot cope with the incredible demand placed upon them, which is why we can't buy Xboxes, PlayStations, AMD CPU's, nVidia GPUs and now AMD GPUs.

And with their previous lines , AMD had massive performance issues when compared to nVIDIA 's architectures , but this didn't stop those people saying that AMD should be supported in order to stop the ""nVIDIA monopoly which will be bad for customers"" .
Almost none of those people say the same for Samsung Vs TSMC , and this is my problem , the hypocrisy ...

 

[Vya Domus]

And with their previous lines , AMD had massive performance issues when compared to nVIDIA 's architectures

It had little to do with the architecture, AMD was in trouble when they were stuck using GloFo, as soon as they moved to TSMC both CPUs and GPUs got significantly faster and more efficient.

That's just a coincidence, right ?

No, it's not, the node is by far one of the most important things in developing these products. You need the best node, period. AMD doesn't have a foundry so it should be completely irrelevant to me or anyone else who has a monopoly on nodes, there is no point in supporting Samsung's inferior process.

What are you even suggesting ? To buy Nvidia products so that Samsung sells more wafers so that maybe they make better nodes so that maybe future products are better ? That's a lot of "maybe", people don't buy wafers they buy GPUs.

What are we even talking about.

 

[nguyen]

It's amazing how many people don't follow the news, even when it has been published on this site!

Samsung have massive yield issues, and TSMC would not do business with nVidia due to them demanding a discount, forcing nVidia to go with Samsung.

And to be clear, TSMC needs competition, but Samsung is hardly it, at least at the moment. It's a shame, and hopefully Samsung will improve their process tech, and yield issues. That will be to the benefit of us, the customers, as it's obvious to see right now, TSMC simply cannot cope with the incredible demand placed upon them, which is why we can't buy Xboxes, PlayStations, AMD CPU's, nVidia GPUs and now AMD GPUs.

So you expect Samsung just magically competes with TSMC out of sheer will alone . Obviously Samsung needed the foundry expertise of Nvidia much more so than they need profit.

Doesn't matter how you spin it, Ampere are flying off the shelves atm and RX6000 will do nothing to change that.
In the end we have both TSMC and Samsung producing as many chips as they could, yet could not meet the current demands, and you want TSMC as the sole fab because they are the best ? doesn't sound like good decision making to me.

 

[sith'ari]

It had little to do with the architecture, AMD was in trouble when they were stuck using GloFo, as soon as they moved to TSMC both CPUs and GPUs got significantly faster and more efficient.
That's just a coincidence, right ?
No, it's not, the node is by far one of the most important things in developing these products. You need the best node, period. AMD doesn't have a foundry so it should be completely irrelevant to me or anyone else who has a monopoly on nodes, there is no point in supporting Samsung's inferior process.
What are you even suggesting ? To buy Nvidia products so that Samsung sells more wafers so that maybe they make better nodes so that maybe future products are better ? That's a lot of "maybe", people don't buy wafers they buy GPUs.
What are we even talking about.

Radeon VII as its name clearly states (it can't get more clear really) that it was a 7nm architecture , just like RX5700-series , so , just like i already said above :
""""""And with their previous lines , AMD had massive performance issues when compared to nVIDIA 's architectures""""""

 

[Vya Domus]

Radeon VII as its name clearly states (it can't get more clear really) that it was a 7nm architecture , just like RX5700-series , so , just like i already said above :
""""""And with their previous lines , AMD had massive performance issues when compared to nVIDIA 's architectures""""""

???

 

[sith'ari]

???

exactly....

 

[Vya Domus]

exactly....

Good.

 

[nguyen]

exactly....

yeah someone here doesn't know what he's talking about

Best node but shitty product vs shitty node but good product.

 

[Vya Domus]

yeah someone here doesn't know what he's talking about

Yeah, you're overflowing with knowledge buddy, just look at this line :

Best node but shitty product vs shitty node but good product.

Now that's how an expert would put it, I bet that's how AMD/Nvidia engineers talk in their meetings.

Real high IQ talk right there.

 

[sith'ari]

Good.

i have underlined what you said and i answered it : you said :
"""""It had little to do with the architecture, AMD was in trouble when they were stuck using GloFo........... """"""
and i answered to what you said by mentioning that Radeon VII and RX5700-series were manufactured at 7nm TSMC ,not by GloFo ....

 

[nguyen]

Yeah, you're overflowing with knowledge buddy, just look at this line :
I bet that's how AMD/Nvidia engineers talk in their meetings.

Best node doesn't mean good GPU as @sith'ari pointed out the Radeon VII
Why are you so hell bent on TSMC 7nm anyways ? are you gonna buy Ampere had it been more efficient but much more expensive ? let say 3080 at 800usd ?