NVIDIA's AI boom

I'm not an enterprise customer, the products driving NVIDIA's huge growth here aren't something I'll ever be a (direct) customer of. But NVIDIA is of interest to me as a PC gamer and as a general tech enthusiast. I'm interested in the development of GPUs and other chips.

Usually the revenue and profits of a big corporation are of little interest to me, but the numbers we're seeing from NVIDIA are impressive.

• Record revenue of $18.12 billion, up 34% from Q2, up 206% from year ago
• Record Data Center revenue of $14.51 billion, up 41% from Q2, up 279% from year ago

NVIDIA Announces Financial Results for Third Quarter Fiscal 2024

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported revenue for the third quarter ended October 29, 2023, of $18.12 billion, up 206% from a year ago and up 34% from the previous quarter.

NVIDIA Newsroom

NVIDIA has spent a decade selling their 'AI' capabilities, their R&D and all around investment in the development of these capabilities in their silicon. As a gamer, NVIDIA's 'AI' technologies such as DLSS have had a significant impact on the industry and are a key selling point for their gaming GPUs.

Gaming was NVIDIA's bread and butter for a long time, NVIDIA was a gaming company at one point. But no longer, it's an enterprise behemoth offering data centre, AI and HPC capabilities that others aren't currently competitive with. NVIDIA's investment over the past 10-15 years has paid off massively with the current 'AI' boom.

Look at Q4 22/Q1 23, Gaming and Data Centre were roughly equal. Q3 23? Data centre revenue is roughly 5 times greater than gaming revenue. There's caveats to this, their products in each category are at different stages of their lifecycle, but nonetheless, the broad facts are true: Data Centre dwarves Gaming in NVIDIA's world now.

The products I'm interested in from NVIDIA are the gaming products, and NVIDIA is the market leader in PC gaming too. Should we be worried about a decreased focus on this? Investment into chip development moving in a direction that slows down progress in gaming? Or maybe we'll benefit from a massively increased R&D budget for data centre chip development that trickles down to the gaming GPUs?

I'm not sure, as much of the mainstream 'AI' attention is aimed at companies like the currently imploding OpenAI, it's notable how well positioned NVIDIA is to own a significant portion of this probably massive emerging market and how much they already do.