A broad recovery in datacenter sales helped Nvidia beat expectations for earnings for the fourth fiscal quarter ended January 26.
Nvidia reported non-GAAP net income per share of $1.86 on revenues of $3.11 billion, compared with net income per share of 80 cents on revenues of $2.2 billion a year earlier. In after-hours trading, Nvidia’s stock price is up 6.2% to $288 a share.
Still, scares about the coronavirus and what the company says about it are expected to weigh heavily. Analysts were expecting $1.66 a share on revenue of $2.96 billion. Nvidia’s twin businesses of AI and gaming chips are both going strong, and its rivals Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have also posted good quarterly results amid a recovery of datacenter computing.
For fiscal 2020, revenue was $10.92 billion, down 7% from $11.72 billion a year earlier. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $5.79, down 13% from $6.64 a year earlier.
“Adoption of Nvidia accelerated computing drove excellent results, with record data center revenue,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in a statement. “Our initiatives are achieving great success.”
He added, “Nvidia RTX ray tracing is reinventing computer graphics, driving powerful adoption across gaming, VR and design markets, while opening new opportunities in rendering and cloud gaming. Nvidia AI is enabling breakthroughs in language understanding, conversational AI and recommendation engines — the core algorithms that power the internet today. And new NVIDIA computing applications in 5G, genomics, robotics and autonomous vehicles enable us to continue important work that has great impact. We are well-positioned for the greatest technology trends of our time.”
For the first fiscal quarter that ends at the close of April, Nvidia said it expects revenue to be $3.0 billion, plus or minus 2%. GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 65% and 65.4%, respectively.