NVIDIA quarterly revenue smashes through $5 billion for first time

Despite the ongoing shortage of GPUs, NVIDIA just posted another record-breaking quarter. The green team's revenue is on fire, for the first time ever the company's quarterly sales totaled more than $5 billion. The strong growth in revenue is driven by large growth in the Gaming and Data Center markets. Compared with the same quarter a year ago, both the Gaming and Data Center units pulled in about $1 billion more each!

Quarterly revenue was $180 million higher than Wall Street's estimates and non-GAAP EPS of $3.10 was a $0.29 beat versus estimates. The growth streak is expected to continue, NVIDIA anticipates it will pull in $5.30 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, in sales this quarter. For comparison, analyst's consensus for this figure was only $4.53 billion.

For the full fiscal year, NVIDIA's revenue was a record $16.68 billion, up 53 percent year-over-year. Gaming made up the bulk of NVIDIA's sales, full-year revenue for this segment came in at a record $7.76 billion, up 41 percent year-over-year. The biggest gainer was Data Center, this unit saw 124 percent year-over-year growth to a record $6.70 billion. Professional visualization and automotive chip sales were down, but these days those segments make up a relatively small fraction of NVIDIA's total revenue.

NVIDIA today reported record revenue for the fourth quarter ended January 31, 2021, of $5.00 billion, up 61 percent from $3.11 billion a year earlier, and up 6 percent from $4.73 billion in the previous quarter. The company’s Gaming and Data Center platforms achieved record revenue for the quarter and year.

GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were a record $2.31, up 51 percent from $1.53 a year ago, and up 9 percent from $2.12 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $3.10, up 64 percent from $1.89 a year earlier, and up 7 percent from $2.91 in the previous quarter.

For fiscal 2021, revenue was a record $16.68 billion, up 53 percent from $10.92 billion a year earlier. GAAP earnings per diluted share were a record $6.90, up 53 percent from $4.52 a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $10.00, up 73 percent from $5.79 a year earlier.

“Q4 was another record quarter, capping a breakout year for NVIDIA’s computing platforms,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Our pioneering work in accelerated computing has led to gaming becoming the world’s most popular entertainment, to supercomputing being democratized for all researchers, and to AI emerging as the most important force in technology.

“Demand for GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs is incredible. NVIDIA RTX has started a major upgrade cycle as gamers jump to ray tracing, DLSS and AI.

“Our A100 universal AI data center GPUs are ramping strongly across cloud-service providers and vertical industries. Thousands of companies across the world are applying NVIDIA AI to create cloud-connected products with AI services that will transform the world’s largest industries. We are seeing the smartphone moment for every industry.

“Mellanox has expanded our footprint across the data center. And we are making good progress toward acquiring Arm, which will create enormous new opportunities for the entire ecosystem,” he said.

NVIDIA paid quarterly cash dividends of $99 million in the fourth quarter and $395 million in fiscal 2021. It will pay its next quarterly cash dividend of $0.16 per share on March 31, 2021, to all shareholders of record on March 10, 2021. - NVIDIA