For its second quarter of FY2022 that ended on August 1, Nvidia on Wednesday posted its all-time record quarterly revenue of $6.507 billion, a 68.3% increase over the same period a year ago. The company's sales were driven by unprecedented demand for high-end gaming GPUs, professional graphics cards used for ProViz applications, and cryptocurrency mining.
Nvidia's revenues have been steadily increasing ever since the company introduced its GeForce RTX 3000-series 'Ampere' GPUs last September that quickly gained acceptance among gamers despite very high MSRPs. The popularity of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics cards, many of which are among the best graphics cards, has remained high, despite soaring prices due to shortages, which is why Nvidia sold every single graphics processor it could produce in the last 12 months or so.
As Nvidia ramped production of datacenter and professional solutions based on the Ampere architecture in the recent quarters, the company's revenue and profitability increased significantly as such products are sold at a huge premium. Furthermore, the company's products for automotive applications were also on the rise in Q2.
Along with an all-time high revenue of $6.507 billion, Nvidia also posted a $2.374 billion net income in Q2 FY2022, a 282% increase over $622 million in Q2 FY2021. The company's gross margin also increased to 64.8%, up from 58.8% in the same quarter a year ago.
Gaming & Mining
Nvidia's bread and butter has always been its graphics business and in the recent quarter it has been thriving due to high average selling prices, record demand, and Ethereum mining. Sales of Nvidia's gaming hardware (which includes GeForce GPUs and console SoCs) in Q2 FY2022 totaled $3.061 billion, up 11% sequentially and up 85% year-over-year.
Nvidia claims that over 80% of the new Ampere GPUs it shipped during the quarter were LHR (low hash rate) GPUs not particularly suitable for mining, so that vast majority (yet not all, Nvidia admits that) of GeForce RTX graphics cards sold in Q2 FY2022 ended up in the hands of gamers.
Sales of Nvidia's CMP (crypto mining processor) lineup totaled $266 million, up significantly from around $150 million in Q1 FY2022. Meanwhile, as profitability of Ethereum mining drops, Nvidia expects sales of CMP to collapse and shipments of gaming graphics boards to suffer moderately too.
Datacenters & ProViz
Sales of professional graphics cards and datacenter solutions are driven by multiple factors, including new products introductions, upgrade cycles, and a number of other. Back in the first quarter Nvidia introduced several new A-series compute GPUs for datacenters and RTX-series GPUs for ProViz applications. Since these products ramped up in Q2, Nvidia's datacenter business posted a $2.366 billion revenue, a 35% increase compared to the same quarter a year ago, whereas the company's ProViz business sold graphics boards worth $519 million, a 156% year-over-year increase.
Outlook
For companies like Nvidia, the third quarter is always the most successful because PC makers are increasing orders as they are preparing for back-to-school (BTS) and holiday seasons. For the third quarter of its FY2022 (Q3 CY2021), Nvidia expects its revenues to hit $6.80 billion ±2% and gross margins to decrease to 65.2%.
