Chipmaker Nvidia has seen demand for its data centers, AI services and graphic processing unit [GPU] rise as companies consider integrating AI into operations.
The company recorded data center revenue of $10.32 billion in the second quarter of 2023, up 141% quarter over quarter and up 171% year over year, according to its earnings supplements.
“A new computing era has begun. The industry is simultaneously going through two platform transitions: accelerated computing and generative AI,” Chief Executive Jensen Huang said during Wednesday’s earnings call for the quarter ended July 30. “Data centers are making a platform shift from general-purpose to accelerated computing. The trillion dollars of global data centers will transition to accelerated computing to achieve an order of magnitude better performance, energy efficiency and cost,” he added.
THE BIG PICTURE: Financial institutions have been pivoting to the cloud to increase efficiency and security.
Citizens Bank, for example, plans to move operations to the cloud by 2025 and is working with Amazon Web Services to make the transition, Michael Ruttledge, chief information officer at Citizens, told Bank Automation News last month.
“By geography, data center growth was strongest in the U.S. as customers direct their capital investments to AI and accelerated computing,” Colette Kress, chief financial officer at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, said during the earnings call.
Export restrictions on Nvidia’s data center GPUs to China “would have an immediate material impact to our financial results,” Kress said. “Restrictions prohibiting the sale of our data center GPUs to China, if implemented, will result in a permanent loss of an opportunity for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets.”
BY THE NUMBERS: In Q2, Nvidia reported;
- Record revenue of $13.51 billion, up by 88% QoQ and 101% YoY;
- Net Income of $6.1 billion, up by 203% QoQ and 843% YoY; and
- Gaming revenue of $2.49 billion, up by 11% QoQ and 22% YoY.
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING: Gartner AI analyst Moutusi Sau told BAN that Nvidia has been at the forefront of developing hardware for AI services. “Nvidia had two foundation models that were already catering to the banks before ChatGPT became a big thing,” Sau said. “A lot of development in generative AI will be hardware-dependent, and NVIDIA has an edge in that space.”
A post-earnings report from Zacks Equity Research states that “NVIDIA is a dominant name in the data center, professional visualization and gaming markets where Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are playing a catch-up role,” and that the company’s “partnership with almost all major cloud service providers and server vendors is a key catalyst” for its growth.
OF NOTE: Nvidia sees increased demand for its generative AI products from the financial services sector.
Malcolm deMayo, global vice president of financial services at Nvidia, told BAN that Generative AI “will be used to create better investment strategies, more personalized content, more accurate customer service solutions, and faster fraud and compliance investigation.”
Nvidia’s NeMo framework, a cloud-based generative AI model for developing large language models, will help companies develop AI capabilities, including chatbots.
“Virtually every industry can benefit from generative AI,” CFO Kress said, adding that the tech “can boost the productivity of over a billion office workers and tens of millions of software engineers.”
MARKET REACTION: Nvidia’s price-equity ratio trailing twelve 12 months (PE TTM) stood at 89.9 while Apple’s PE TTM ratio stood at 30.9, per Zacks Equity Research.
Nvidia’s stock stood at $471, jumping by 0.10% on Thursday trading.
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