Nvidia Corp. reported Wednesday that quarterly topped $5 billion for the first time in the fourth quarter, as holiday gaming chip demand and renewed interest in cryptocurrency mining met with supply shortages.
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Revenue surpassed $5 billion for the first time, by about $3 million, up 61% from $3.11 billion in the year-ago quarter, during a holiday season in which gamers found it difficult to find graphics cards, much less ones near the suggested retail price, as cryptocurrency prices skyrocketed. Just three months ago, Nvidia sales set a record by surpassing $4 billion in quarterly sales for the first time.
Analysts surveyed by FactSet had estimated $2.81 a share on revenue of $4.82 billion, based on Nvidia’s revenue forecast of $4.7 billion to $4.9 billion.
Gaming sales surged 67% to a record $2.5 billion, while analysts had expected Nvidia gaming sales of $2.36 billion.
“Demand for GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs is incredible,” Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a statement.
On a conference call Wednesday afternoon, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said that gaming card supply will likely remain lean.
“The entire 30 series lineup has been hard to keep in stock and we exited Q4 with channel inventories even lower than when we started,” Kress said on the call. “Although we are increasing supply, channel inventories will likely remain low throughout Q1.
Nvidia announced last week that it hopes to ease shortages of gaming cards by launching a chip designed for cryptocurrency mining, called the CM. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin BTCUSD,
On the call, Kress said the company expects about $50 million from CMP sales in the first quarter, and the company plans to break out cryptocurrency-related sales in the future.
On the data-center side, sales nearly doubled to $1.9 billion from the year-ago period, while analysts expected sales of $1.85 billion.
“Our A100 universal AI data center GPUs are ramping strongly across cloud-service providers and vertical industries” Huang said. “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.”
For the first quarter, Nvidia forecast revenue of $5.19 billion to $5.41 billion, while analysts had forecast revenue of $4.49 billion on average.
Shares rose 1.3% after hours, following a 2.5% rise in the regular session to close at $579.96.
Over the past 12 months, Nvidia shares have rallied 112%, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX,
