A decade ago, no one would have guessed NVIDIA’s booming business would be selling hardware to data centres and that revenue from cryptocurrency miners would be on the decline. Or, you know, that cryptocurrency is even a thing. Yet, here we are in 2018, with NVIDIA’s latest investor update covering these very issues.
NVIDIA CFO Colette Kress told investors this week that “cryptocurrency-related revenue [should] fall 65 percent”, according to a story by Reuters’ Sonam Rai and Stephen Nellis.
This represents a drop from $US289 ($383.2) million to $US100 ($132.5) million in annual revenue from the segment.
What’s interesting is that NVIDIA revealed cryptocurrency figures at all, something the article states it has never done previously. That $US289 million is about nine per cent of the company’s $US3.2 ($4.42) billion revenue.
But NVIDIA is confident the miner’s loss will be the gamer’s gain:
Revenue from Nvidia’s best-known business of gaming chips rose 68 percent to $1.72 billion, beating analysts’ average estimate of $1.65 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
“At the core of it, gaming is strong,” Chief Executive Jensen Huang told investors on the conference call. “The pent-up demand is quite significant and I’m expecting the gamers to be able to buy new GeForces pretty soon.”
Amazon, Microsoft and Google have been buying up big, spending a hefty $US701 ($929.3) million on NVIDIA products:
Revenue from Nvidia’s data center business … rose 71 percent to $701 million. That missed targets of some analysts including Deutsche Bank, although it topped the Factset consensus of $656 million.
So it’s crypto out, cloud and gaming in. Hopefully that means more affordable prices for GPUs… but don’t hold your breath.
Chipmaker Nvidia sees fewer crypto miners, more gamers in future [Reuters]