Nvidia has released its second-quarter results, showing that gaming is still bringing in growth and profits for the company, but their big gamble on cryptocurrency mining backfired.
Revenue for the quarter hit $3.12 billion, of which $1.805 billion came from gaming. Earnings reached $1.76 per share, an increase of 91 per cent from last year, higher than estimates of $1.66 per share.
Nvidia set its estimates for growth in the next quarter at $3.25 billion, with a gross margin of 62.6 per cent.
Figures from Nvidia
Over the quarter net income rose 89 per cent to $1.1 billion, with gaming revenue jumping 52 per cent from last year, reaching $1.8 billion. Nvidia’s data centre chip business grew 83 percent to $760 million, beating estimates of $743.6 million.
Despite beating Wall Street estimates for five quarters in a row shares still fell, hitting $240.92 – down 7 per cent.
Cryptocurrency had been expected to generate $100 million in revenue but only managed to scrape in $18 million, down from $289 million from the previous quarter.
Nvidia commented on the huge disparity between crypto estimates and results, saying “We had previously anticipated cryptocurrency to be meaningful for the year, we are now projecting no contributions going forward,”
Graphics cards have been used for their high powered capabilities to mine cryptocurrencies like BitCoin and Ethereum. When the crypto mining market emerged both Nvidia and its competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc had placed high expectations on the performance of this section of the market.
Both Nvidia and AMD had supply issues as graphics card demand for mining boomed, with Nvidia’s GeForce range prices rising over $1000 in the first quarter. Market volatility and unanswered legal questions around BitCoin and Ethereum came to a head during this quarter, crushing expectations.
Nvidia also announced it’s new GPU, Turing chip, ray tracing technology and 8K capabilities. CEO Jensen Huang called the new generation of GPUs the greatest technological leap since the invention of CUDA.
Real time ray tracing will be coming to the new line of Quadro cards, the RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000.
