Nvidia's graphics cards have become essential picks-and-shovels for data centers, gaming, and autonomous vehicles. While cryptocurrency mining is a hyped area for Nvidia's GPU chips, our earnings call transcript tool suggest it's not as important. We take a look at what Nvidia's Q1'18 results mean for the company's strategy.
- Nvidia’s bread-and-butter markets are gaming, data centers, and auto tech. Despite all the hand-wringing about cryptocurrency mining, Nvidia has barely mentioned cryptocurrency keywords on its calls. For the last few years, however, the C-suite has talked data centers and auto with far greater frequency on earnings calls.
- On its most recent earnings call, Nvidia warned investors that cryptocurrency miners’ demand for GPUs will drop by two-thirds due to increased mining difficulty. CFO Colette Kress said, “Cryptocurrency demand was again stronger than expected, but we were able to fulfill most of it with crypto-specific GPUs … Looking into Q2, we expect crypto-specific revenue to be about one-third of its Q1 level.” After a cryptocurrency bull run into early 2018, hype has fallen and miners are seeing profits shrink. And some miners are turning to more energy-efficient ASIC chips.
- Looking at the numbers and executives’ statements, it’s clear that gaming is the real growth area for Nvidia. This is unsurprising given these categories represent a far greater proportion in revenue.
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