Closer look at applications of NVIDIA CUDA and Tesla

Oil & Gas: As mentioned in the Andy Keane chat and at last year’s event through the Headwave presentation, the Oil & Gas industry remains a large opportunity that could fairly rapidly generate tens of millions of dollars in gross profit. We’re in the prototyping stage right now, with real solutions being ready and just needing to be proven and polished to go into mass deployment in the next 6 months and beyond.

The primary usage of high levels of computation here is for the discovery of new oil reserves and the drilling of new wells underwater, but as Andy said the high performance requirements related to the maintenance of existing wells (i.e. trying to extract more oil out it rather than leave it under the earth because it’s now economical to do so) could also become a significant revenue opportunity. It’s hard to predict the magnitude, but there are many large oil companies in the world and each might want a few 1000U+ clusters, so this could revenue a gross profit opportunity well in excess of a hundred million dollars. Note that this is our own estimation, and may or may not be equal to NVIDIA’s own internal forecasting.