Nvidia releases Q1 financial results

Nvidia has announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2021, and it's been a a confident start for the firm. 

Already a busy week for the company given its various announcements in the last few days, the company's greatest achievement in this first quarter is its Data Centre business achieving a record and its first $1 billion quarter. With that kind of result, it seems very likely that the data centre side of business will soon surpass gaming as Nvidia's main revenue source, placing the company in a strong position to be far more powerful. 

Overall, Nvidia's revenue was up 39 percent compared to last year, coming in at $3.08 billion in contrast to last year's figure of $2.22 billion. Impressively, compared to Q4 which is traditionally always a good quarter, revenue was only down 1 percent from $3.11 billion. 

The tech giant has similarly positive hopes for the next quarter too, with some of that optimism stemming from its recent acquisition of Mellanox which closed on the first day of the new quarter. Mellanox, in case you forgot, is an Israeli-American supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology, and clearly a nod towards Nvidia's plans for expansion within this sector. 

When broken down, gaming revenue for Nvidia was $1.34 billion, down 10 percent compared to the previous quarter but up 27 percent year-on-year. Nvidia used this time to also point out its gaming achievements including the release of more than 100 new laptop models that utilise GeForce GPUs, the release of DLSS 2.0, and the expansion of GeForce Now. 

The big success story though is Nvidia's data centre wing. Its first quarter revenue was $1.14 billion - a new record as previously stated - and up a whopping 80 percent from Q1 last year. Nvidia mentioned achievements like its new A100 data centre GPU, the launch of the DGX A100 AI system, along with the introduction of two products from the EGX Edge AI platform - the EGX A100 and EGX Jetson Xavier NX. 

In contrast, professional visualisation and the automotive sectors saw a decline with the former seeing a down swing of 15 percent from last year and automotive seeing a drop of 7 percent compared to the previous year. It's clear that Nvidia's focus is switching to the data centre sector alongside gaming, and the trend is probably going to continue for a while to come.