Nvidia releases Q2 FY2017 earnings

Beats forecast expectations

Nvidia released its financial results yesterday for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2017, which ended July 31, 2016.

The company’s numbers came in slightly better than expected during a quarter fueled by consumer interest in the 4K-capable 16nm Pascal GPU product family, along with increasing enterprise investments in Nvidia’s GPU-accelerated deep learning, computer vision and AI platforms and products.

Source: Nvidia

The company turned in revenues of $ 1.43 billion with 58.1 percent adjusted gross margin. This is up nine percent from $ 1.30 billion in Q1 (February 1 to May 1, 2016) and up 24 percent from $ 1.103 billion a year earlier in Q2 FY2016 (April 27 to July 26, 2015).

Looking ahead at a forecast for Q3 FY2017 – ending late October – the company is issuing guidance between $ 1.65 and $ 1.71 billion, or between 57.5 and 58.5 percent adjusted gross margin.

During the company’s Q2 FY2016 ending July 31, 2016, the company unveiled its flagship Geforce GTX 1080 graphics card along with the Geforce GTX 1070 and Geforce GTX 1060. Just two days later after the quarter ended, it released an even higher-performing Pascal enthusiast model – the Geforce GTX Titan X – although revenue numbers from this card will be presented in Q3 FY2017 results in a few months from now.

“Strong demand for our new Pascal-generation GPUs and surging interest in deep learning drove record results,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer, NVIDIA. “Our strategy to focus on creating the future where graphics, computer vision and artificial intelligence converge is fueling growth across our specialized platforms — Gaming, Pro Visualization, Datacenter and Automotive.”

As we mentioned a few days ago, the driverless automotive market is expected to grow to $ 42 billion in nine years and so far the few companies that have signed on with Nvidia’s Drive PX hardware include BMW, Ford, Daimler and Audi. Nvidia is currently working closely with Audi as its primary brand but will soon move to Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda, Lamborghini and Bentley.

“We are more excited than ever about the impact of deep learning and AI, which will touch every industry and market. We have made significant investments over the past five years to evolve our entire GPU computing stack for deep learning. Now, we are well positioned to partner with researchers and developers all over the world to democratize this powerful technology and invent its future,” Jen-Hsun said.

During the quarter ending July 31st, Nvidia also launched the Quadro P6000 workstation GPU with 12 teraflops of compute power, introduced the Tesla P100 accelerator for PCI-E based servers, released its first self-created game called VR Funhouse, and introduced an ultra-high resolution screenshot capture utility called Ansel, although it is limited to a few select games for now.