Nvidia said cryptocurrency-fueled demand had dried up and gave forecast sales below targets, despite th company's quarterly results that otherwise beat expectations.

Last fiscal quarter, sales to so-called miners of digital currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum amounted to $289 million, nearly a 10th of Nvidia's revenue. Nvidia previously had forecast sales for cryptocurrency chips for the fiscal second quarter ended July 29 of about $100 million. On Thursday it reported actual revenue of only $18 million.

"We benefited in the last several quarters from an unusual lift from crypto," CEO Jensen Huang said on a conference call with analysts, "but at this time, we consider it to be immaterial for the second half" of the fiscal year.

The company projected third-quarter revenue of $3.25 billion, plus or minus 2 percent.

Nvidia's gross margin forecast was 62.8 percent, slightly below expectations of 62.9 percent and possibly a result of putting more memory modules on its chips.

In any case, Nvidia's sales of chips to data centers, AI, Gaming, Professional Visualization and self-driving cars drove a great last quarter.

Nvidia's largest and oldest business of selling graphical processing units, or GPUs brought in $1.8 billion.

Nvidia is widely expected to unveil a new generation of gaming chips ahead of the holiday shopping seasons, possibly as soon as next week.

Revenue from the company's data center chips business rose 83 percent to $760 million.

Total revenue rose 40 percent to $3.12 billion.