Nvidia share price slips as crypto boom fades

Nvidia has reported a 40% year-on-year boost, though weakening demand in the cryptocurrency business unit dampened excitement.

With total revenues standing at $3.12 billion for the three months, cryptocurrency-specific products declined to approximately $100 million with the downward spiral set to continue through the next couple of quarters. While the business anticipated the demand to remain throughout the year, projections account for no contributions going forward.

Looking at the other individual business units, Gaming revenue was $1.8 billion, up 52% from a year ago and up 5% sequentially. Professional Visualization revenue reached $281 million, up 20% year-on-year and up 12% sequentially. Data-centre revenue was $760 million, up 83% from 2017 and 8% sequentially, led by strong sales of Volta architecture products. OEM and IP revenue was $116 million, down 54%, with the crypto business dragging everything down here. Automotive grew 13% to $161 million.

“Growth across every platform – AI, Gaming, Professional Visualization, self-driving cars – drove another great quarter,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. “Fuelling our growth is the widening gap between demand for computing across every industry and the limits reached by traditional computing. Developers are jumping on the GPU-accelerated computing model that we pioneered for the boost they need.

“We announced Turing this week. Turing is the world’s first ray-tracing GPU and completes the Nvidia RTX platform, realizing a 40-year dream of the computer graphics industry. Turing is a giant leap forward and the greatest advance for computing since we introduced CUDA over a decade ago.”

Speaking at the SIGGRAPH professional graphics conference in Vancouver last week, Huang unveiled Turing, Nvidia’s eighth-generation GPU architecture, bringing ray tracing to real-time graphics. The management team believe this is the company’s most important innovation since the invention of the CUDA GPU more than a decade ago.

Turing is claimed to fundamentally changes how computer graphics will be done, and is the result of more than 10,000 engineering-years of effort. It better work now.