Gaming GPUs are no longer the most profitable business for Nvidia

For the first time in team green’s history, the quarterly earnings from the gaming GPU business have been surpassed by the revenues brought in by the data center branch. This should make more sense if we factor in the Mellanox acquisition from last year, which is now starting to show its benefits.

The Q2 earnings for the 2021 fiscal year revealed by Nvidia yesterday show how the data center business brought in US$1.75 billion, which translates into 54% growth over the previous quarter and an impressive 167% growth on a year-over-year basis. Apart from the Mellanox boost, the rampant growth is also attributed to the Ampere A100 compute accelerators that started shipping in May. This is clearly acknowledged in the press release: “Our new Ampere GPU architecture is sprinting out of the blocks, with the world’s top cloud service providers and server makers moving quickly to offer NVIDIA accelerated computing.”

Despite the surprising growth with the data center sector, the gaming GPU division still performed as expected, bringing in US$1.65 billion for Q2, which translates into 24% growth over Q1 and 26% growth on a year-over-year basis. Other segments that brought significant revenues include the professional virtualization business with US$203 million and the automotive branch with US$111 million. Regarding the automotive side of things, the press release mentions that “Mercedes-Benz’s partnership with NVIDIA to power its next-generation fleet of luxury cars — from the computer to the AI software, and from the cloud to the car — is transformative."