Nvidia Chips ride Cryptocurrency Boom
Nvidia's quarterly revenue in its data center and automotive businesses missed estimates, but earnings and revenue beat analysts' targets, due to strength in gaming chips that are also used to process cryptocurrency transactions.
Revenue from Nvidia's data center business - which counts Amazon.com's Web Services and Microsoft's Azure cloud business among its customers - more than doubled to $416 million.
Automotive business revenue surged 19.3 percent to $142 million, but also fell short of analyst expectations.
Sales of high-end gaming graphics cards used to process cryptocurrency transactions soared. Miners use computers to process cryptocurrency transactions, and they are rewarded with additional cryptocurrency.
Net income more than doubled to $583 million in the second quarter ended July 30.
Nvidia's total revenue rose 56 percent to $2.23 billion.
For the third quarter, Nvidia said it expects revenue to be $2.35 billion, plus or minus 2 percent.
"Adoption of NVIDIA GPU computing is accelerating, driving growth across our businesses," CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement. "Datacenter revenue increased more than two and a half times. A growing number of car and robot-taxi companies are choosing our DRIVE PX self-driving computing platform. And in Gaming, increasingly the world's most popular form of entertainment, we power the fastest growing platforms - GeForce and Nintendo Switch.
The chief executive also highlighted the company's AI innovations, including the Volta GPU for deep learning.
"This quarter, we shipped Volta in volume to leading AI customers," he said. "This is the era of AI, and the NVIDIA GPU has become its brain."