NVIDIA sold $150 million worth of cryptocurrency cards in Q2

A Goldman Sachs analyst asked NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang for a little more colour on some of the numbers concerning the firm's big earnings beat. NVIDIA's second-quarter revenue came in about $250 million higher than the company had guided last quarter.

Huang reveals that at least $150 million can be attributed to the special cryptocurrency mining video cards that the company shipped directly to large-scale Ethereum miners.

This does not include the GeForce cards that are sold via the retail market, Huang said there's still mining demand for regular GeForce cards but implied the big miners buy the special mining SKUs.

Jen-Hsun Huang - NVIDIA Corp.
Sure, let's see. First of all, we actually gave a really great guidance last quarter, and we beat it by $250 million. And the $250 million you could see in our – we categorized under the OEM SKUs basically the cryptocurrency SKUs. And that, if you reverse-engineered it out, I think is approximately $150 million. And we serve the vast – I would say the large majority of the cryptocurrency demand out of that specialized products.

There are still small miners that buy GeForces here and there, and that probably also increased the demand of GeForces. There were a lot of shortages all over the world. And as we go into this quarter, there's still cryptocurrency mining demand that we know is out there. And based on our analytics and understanding of the marketplace, there will be some amount of demand for the foreseeable future. But it's also the case that there were gamers whose needs and demands were not filled last quarter.

NVIDIA accounted for the cryptocurrency SKUs in its "OEM & IP" sales segment. I was already wondering why this segment was up hugely, especially because NVIDIA is no longer receiving license revenue from Intel. The final cash payment from Intel accounted for $43 million last quarter.