Nvidia on Monday said first quarter revenue would exceed the previously expected $5.30 billion, citing strong demand for its GPUs for datacenters, gaming, and cryptocurrency mining. The company says that demand for its products exceeds supply and will continue to throughout the rest of the year.
“While our fiscal 2022 first quarter is not yet complete, Q1 total revenue is tracking above the $5.30 billion outlook provided during our fiscal year-end earnings call,” said Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Nvidia. “Within Data Center we have good visibility, and we expect another strong year. Industries are increasingly using AI to improve their products and services. We expect this will lead to increased consumption of our platform through cloud service providers, resulting in more purchases as we go through the year.”
Sales of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GPUs are on the rise as people staying home during the pandemic, buy them to play games. Meanwhile, modern graphics cards cost significantly more than they used to several years ago, which is why Nvidia’s revenues increase even though volume sales drop.
Nvidia’s datacenter solutions nowadays include much more than compute cards or modules that are sold with huge margins, but also complete machines for AI and HPC workloads. Therefore, average selling prices are increasing on this front as well.
This quarter Nvidia started to sell its CMP-branded cards for cryptocurrency mining and since crypto is on the rise, demand for these products exceeded Nvidia’s expectations by three times. Originally, Nvidia projected to get $50 million selling these GPUs in Q1 FY2022, but now it expects to get $150 million.
While Nvidia’s sales will be higher than it planned, the company says that they could have been even higher if it could meet demand. At this point the company sells everything it can build and it expects demand to exceed its supply going forward.
“Overall demand remains very strong and continues to exceed supply while our channel inventories remain quite lean,” said Kress. “We expect demand to continue to exceed supply for much of this year. We believe we will have sufficient supply to support sequential growth beyond Q1.”