NVIDIA hits record high revenue as datacenter and gaming GPU sales are on fire

NVIDIA reported it fiscal Q3 2021 earnings. The GPU designer broke several records, it achieved a record-high revenue of over $4.72 billion (up 57 percent year-over-year) and both the Gaming and Data Center units smashed through previous revenue records.

NVIDIA beat analysts' expectations, revenue was $310 million higher than projected and non-GAAP EPS of $2.91 was a beat of 36 cents. Despite big issues with GeForce RTX 30 series availability, NVIDIA's Gaming segment revenue was up 37 percent quarter-over-quarter and 37 percent year-over-year.

For the current quarter, NVIDIA expects record revenue of $4.8 billion, plus or minus 2 percent. That's significantly higher than consensus of $4.43 billion. No dividend increase for the second year in a row though, presumably as NVIDIA wants to keep more cash on its balance sheet for the ARM acquisition.

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 ray tracing 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.