AP Photo / Paul Sakuma
- Nvidia posted earnings of $1.33 per share and revenue of $2.64 billion in the third quarter.
- Wall Street was expecting adjusted earnings of $1.07 per share on revenue of $2.362 billion.
- The company has been facing increased competition in the graphics processing space, especially recently.
- Watch Nvidia’s stock price move in real time.
Nvidia released its third-quarter earnings after the bell Thursday.
The company reported earnings of $1.33 per share on revenues of $2.64 billion. Wall Street was expecting adjusted earnings of $1.07 per share on revenue of $2.362 billion. Nvidia’s stock was up about 1.27% after the earnings result.
The company’s revenue beat was fueled by a 175% year over year growth in revenue from its data center business. Strong demand from large-scale customers working on artificial intelligence was the main driver of growth, Nvidia said. It also saw a boost from cryptocurrency-linked demand for its graphics chips, due to skyrocketing prices for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
The company announced it would be increasing its dividend from $0.14 per share to $0.15 per share, to start in December. Nvidia also announced that it had purchased the land for its new headquarters in Santa Clara, California from Wachovia for about $350 million. It was previously leasing the land.
Analysts on Wall Street were bullish on the stock ahead of the earnings, with 19 of the 36 tracked by Bloomberg rating the company a “buy”, and just four rating the company a “sell.”
Millennial investors were bullish on the stock too. Users of the Robinhood stock trading platform, which has proven popular among millennial investors, were buying shares of Nvidia 30% more than they were selling shares.
Nvidia has been facing increased competition recently. Intel has historically kept out of Nvidia’s main graphics processing unit business but has dramatically changed its attitude in the last week. Intel announced a partnership with AMD to produce a single-chip CPU and GPU combo.
Intel also announced that it had poached the head of AMD’s graphics division to start a new graphics division at Intel. The new division will work on developing discrete graphics units that would directly compete with Nvidia’s processors.
Nvidia is up 99.81% this year on the back of increased demand for GPUs from both cryptocurrency miners and data centers using the chips for artificial intelligence tasks.
We will be updating this story with more details when Nvidia releases its earnings. Check back here for more.