Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock is up more than 6% in pre-market trading after it reported earnings that beat expectations for both earnings and sales.
The Silicon Valley-based company also issued a bullish forecast for revenue in the current quarter.
Nvidia reported earnings of $1.17 U.S. per share versus $1.11 U.S. that was expected, up 60% from a year ago. The company’s revenue amounted to $7.10 billion U.S. versus $6.82 billion U.S. expected, up 50% from the same period last year.
Nvidia said it expects to report around $7.4 billion U.S. of revenue in the current quarter, ending in January, higher than analyst expectations of $6.86 billion U.S.
Nvidia stock has been on a big run, with shares up more than 124% year to date. The company has had more demand than it can fill, especially for its hard-to-find GeForce graphics cards that are popular with gamers.
The company has made significant gains in data centres, where cloud providers and big enterprises are turning to the kind of graphics processors made by Nvidia for artificial intelligence applications.
Nvidia reported $2.9 billion U.S. in data center sales, up 55% from $1.9 billion U.S. in the same quarter of 2020. Nvidia said the growth was driven by GPU sales to cloud providers such as Amazon AWS (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Google Cloud (NASDAQ:GOOGL).
Gaming, Nvidia’s biggest market, reported $3.2 billion U.S. in sales, up 42% from $2.27 billion U.S. in the same quarter last year. The company said it was primarily due to increased sales of its GeForce consumer graphics processors.
Nvidia’s gaming graphics cards now have software that prevents them from being used for cryptocurrency mining, the company said. Nvidia introduced dedicated graphics cards for crypto mining earlier this year to help meet some of the demand. It said it sold $105 million U.S. in cryptocurrency-specific graphics cards, down from $266 million U.S. in the previous quarter.
Nvidia is in the process of purchasing Arm, a British vendor for core mobile semiconductor technology. The European Commission opened an in-depth investigation of the transaction last month. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had expressed concerns about the transaction and that the company said it is in talks with the regulator to address those concerns.
Nvidia said it paid $100 million in dividends during the quarter.
