NVIDIA today reported revenue for the first quarter ended April 26, 2020, of $3.08 billion, up 39 percent from $2.22 billion a year earlier, and down 1 percent from $3.11 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $1.47, up 130 percent from $0.64 a year ago, and down 4 percent from $1.53 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.80, up 105 percent from $0.88 a year earlier, and down 5 percent from $1.89 in the previous quarter.
NVIDIA completed its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd. on April 27, 2020, for a transaction value of $7 billion. It also transitioned its GPU Technology Conference to an all-digital format, drawing more than 55,000 registered participants, while NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote videos were viewed 3.8 million times in their first three days.
“As the world battles COVID-19, we salute the first responders, healthcare workers, and service workers who courageously step in harm’s way to save lives and keep the world going,” Huang said. “We also thank the scientists around the world racing to find a vaccine for COVID-19.
“NVIDIA had an excellent quarter. The acquisition of Mellanox expands our cloud and data center opportunity. We raised the bar for AI computing with the launch and shipment of our Ampere GPU. And our digital GTC conference attracted a record number of developers, highlighting the accelerating adoption of NVIDIA GPU computing.
“Our Data Center business achieved a record and its first $1 billion quarter. NVIDIA is well positioned to advance the most powerful technology forces of our time – cloud computing and AI,” he said.
In the first quarter of fiscal 2021, NVIDIA paid dividends of $98 million. Due to current market uncertainties, NVIDIA is evaluating the timing of resuming share repurchases and will remain nimble based on market conditions. NVIDIA is currently authorized to repurchase up to $7.24 billion in shares through December 2022. It remains committed to paying its quarterly dividend.
NVIDIA’s outlook for the second quarter of fiscal 2021 includes the impact from the acquisition of Mellanox, which closed on the first day of the second quarter. The combined second quarter outlook is as follows:
- Revenue is expected to be $3.65 billion, plus or minus 2 percent. Mellanox is expected to contribute a low-teens percentage of combined second quarter revenue.
- GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 58.6 percent and 66.0 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points. The sequential decline in GAAP gross margins primarily reflects an increase in acquisition-related costs, most of which are non-recurring in nature.
- GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $1.52 billion and $1.04 billion, respectively. The sequential change in GAAP operating expenses reflects an increase in stock-based compensation and acquisition-related costs. GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses for the full year, which will include Mellanox starting with the second quarter, are expected at approximately $5.7 billion and $4.1 billion, respectively.
- GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are expected to be an expense of approximately $50 million and $45 million, respectively.
- GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are both expected to be 9 percent, plus or minus 1 percent, excluding any discrete items. GAAP discrete items include excess tax benefits or deficiencies related to stock-based compensation, which are expected to generate variability on a quarter by quarter basis.
Since its previous earnings report, NVIDIA has achieved progress in these areas:
Gaming
- First-quarter revenue was $1.34 billion, down 10 percent sequentially and up 27 percent from a year earlier.
- Launched Minecraft with RTX as an open beta on Windows 10, bringing real-time ray tracing, more realistic materials and DLSS 2.0 to the world’s best-selling videogame.
- Announced the release of more than 100 new laptop models powered by NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, bringing the RTX 2080 SUPER and RTX 2070 SUPER high-end GPUs to laptops for the first time, and enabling RTX 2060 laptop price points as low as $999 for a mass market audience.
- Expanded the RTX Studio lineup with 10 new laptops from Acer, Gigabyte, MSI and Razer, powered by new GeForce RTX SUPER GPUs.
- Released DLSS 2.0, the second generation of its deep learning neural network, which allows gamers on RTX GPUs to boost frame rates as much as two times and increase image resolution for supported games.
- Expanded NVIDIA GeForce NOW, which provides access to 650 games, with 1,500 more waiting to get on board, and has added 2 million users since going live in February.
Data Center
- First-quarter revenue was $1.14 billion, up 18 percent sequentially and up 80 percent from a year earlier.
- Introduced the NVIDIA A100 data center GPU, the first based on the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture, now in full production and shipping worldwide.
- Launched the NVIDIA DGX A100 – a 5-petaflops AI system that delivers elastic, software-defined data center infrastructure for the most demanding workloads – with the first system being used by Argonne National Laboratory on COVID-19 research.
- Introduced two products for the NVIDIA EGX Edge AI platform — the EGX A100 for larger commercial off-the-shelf servers – combining the latest A100 GPU and Mellanox SmartNIC technology — and the EGX Jetson Xavier NX for micro-edge servers.
- Released NVIDIA Jarvis, an application framework enabling companies to offer real-time language-based AI services customized for their own industry, products and customers.
- Collaborated with the open-source community to bring end-to-end GPU acceleration to Apache Spark 3.0, the world’s largest data analytics platform used by more than 500,000 data scientists.
- Announced NVIDIA Merlin, an application framework that democratizes AI-based deep recommender systems.
- Launched the Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx SmartNIC – a highly secure, efficient 25/50 gigabit per second Ethernet smart network interface controller.
Professional Visualization
- First-quarter revenue was $307 million, down 7 percent sequentially and up 15 percent from a year earlier.
- Powered Autodesk’s latest 3D visualization software, VRED 2021, with NVIDIA Quadro RTX — giving designers the ability to create with interactive ray tracing and AI-powered denoising.
- Accelerated Altair’s AccuSolve and TheaRender engineering software with NVIDIA CUDA to speed the creation of high-quality simulations.
- Brought Quadro professional graphics to HP’s ZBook Create and ZBook Studio mobile workstation lineup, offering outstanding performance, mobility and reliability to creatives.
Automotive
- First-quarter revenue was $155 million, down 5 percent sequentially and down 7 percent from a year earlier.
- Announced that the Xpeng P7 all-electric sports sedan, with production deliveries beginning next month, uses the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX platform and DRIVE OS software to deliver level 3 automated driving.
COVID-19 Efforts
- NVIDIA and its employees have committed to donate more than $10 million to those affected during this period.
- Accelerated promotions and raises for employees by several months.
- Released AI models in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health to help researchers detect COVID-19 in lung scans.
- Joined the White House’s COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, alongside leaders from the U.S. government, industry and academia, to accelerate COVID-related research.
- Provided a free 90-day license to NVIDIA Parabricks, a genomics software stack that uses GPUs to accelerate the analysis of gene-sequencing data, to researchers working on COVID-related topics.
CFO Commentary
Commentary on the quarter by Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, as well as a presentation of first-quarter earnings, are available here.
