Nvidia Will Focus on Gaming Because Cryptocurrencies Are 'Volatile' (vice.com)

Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia made almost $10 billion dollars in the last fiscal year, that's up 41 percent from the previous period. The GPU company broke the news to its investors in a conference call on Thursday, and said that video games such as Star Wars: Battlefront II and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds as well as the unprecedented success of the Nintendo Switch led to the record profits. That and cryptocurrency. From a report: Graphics cards are the preferred engine of today's cryptocurrency miners. It's led to a shortage of the GPUs, a spike in their prices, and record profits for the company that manufactures them. "Strong demand in the cryptocurrency market exceeded our expectations," Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress told investors during its earnings call yesterday. "We met some of this demand with a dedicated board in our OEM business and some was met with our gaming GPUs." But Nvidia is having trouble keeping up with the demand and it's recommended retailers put gamers ahead of cryptocurrency miners while supply is limited. Kress acknowledged the shortage on the call and reaffirmed Nvidia's commitment to gamers. "While the overall contribution of cryptocurrency to our business remains hard to quantify, we believe it was a higher percentage of revenue than the prior quarter," she said. "That said, our main focus remains on our core gaming market as cryptocurrency trends will likely remain volatile." When Kress finished her statement and opened up the line to questions, the first question was about cryptocurrency. "Is crypto being modeled more conservatively?" An investor from Evercore asked. "We model crypto approximately flat," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive officer.

Comments

Don't get me wrong but ...

[PIBM]

As a gamer I afforded quite a lot of great cards just because they were paying for themselves when I wasn't gaming. I now have enough good computers that my friends don't need to bring theirs when we have a lan.. =)

Re:It's sensible for nVidia to put gamers first

[houghi]

My dad was a sales person. He always told me "The easiest sale is the firsat one. You will always be able to close the first sale. You can lie and cheat how much you like. You can drop the price to 0. You will be able to make the first sale.The hard ones are the sones after that. To make that easier, you have to build a relation. That is the hard part of sales."

nVidia seem to focus on the second (and later) sales to their customers, something they are not sure about with mining. I am sure they would LOVE to get rid of that mining business if it would be possible without hurting the rest. They probably already looking at how they can have fast gaming and slow mining GPUs.

As far as I understand, AI (used in e.g. recognition in self driving cars) also benefit from GPU. So I could see it being a separate type of business where you have GPU without the graphic output being specially made for things where GPU is abused. And this at much lower prices than what we have now available when you look at the price for the speed you get.