Nvidia data centre revenues up 79% for Q1

An angled shot of the Nvidia logo on its California HQ

Nividia has reported revenues of $5.66 billion for the first fiscal quarter of 2021, with record growth in its gaming, professional visualisation, and data centre segments.

The overall revenue for the quarter ending 2 May is an increase of 84% year-on-year and a 13% rise from the previous quarter. It highlights the company's stable growth at a time where global semiconductor shortages are hampering the wider industry.

Its data centre revenue was up 79% year-on-year, bringing in a record $2.05 billion, with the rise attributed to Mellanox, a data centre firm acquired in 2019, specialising in end-to-end services for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure.

"Mellanox, one year in, has exceeded our expectations and transformed Nvidia into a data-centre-scale computing company," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "We had a fantastic quarter, with strong demand for our products driving record revenue. Our data centre business continues to expand, as the world's industries take up Nvidia AI to process computer vision, conversational AI, natural language understanding and recommender systems."

The firm's graphics segment, comprised mostly of graphics cards, was up 81% to $3.45 billion in revenue, and its gaming products were up 106%, year-on-year, to $2.76 billion in sales. This was mainly fuelled by the increase in gaming during the pandemic, but the GPUs Nvidia makes are also essential for AI and cryptocurrency mining.

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Nvidia recently unveiled its first Arm-based data centre CPU, Nvidia Grace, which is designed for AI and high-performance computing, which currently powers the Swiss National Supercomputer Centre. Its impending takeover of Arm is currently under investigation by the UK's Competition and Market's Authority, though Huang said Nvidia was continuing to "make headway" with the deal.

"From gaming, cloud computing, AI, robotics, self-driving cars, to genomics and computational biology, Nvidia continues to do impactful work to invent a better future," Huang said.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognize him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.