Cloud Growth Sees Nvidia Revenues Surge With Data Centre Hardware

Demand for graphics processing units in data centres to power cloud computing workloads is resulting in healthy revenue jumps for Nvidia.

In its latest quarterly financials, the graphics card company that has its fingers in many other pies, saw a 48.4 percent hike in revenue thanks to the demand for server hardware.

“All of the world’s major internet and cloud service providers now use Nvidia’s Tesla-based GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerators,” Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress said on a post-earnings call.

With the likes of Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft using Nvidia’s server hardware, the company raked in revenue of $409 million (£315m) in its first quarter, double that of previous results and beating analyst expectations.

Reach for the cloud

To many, Nvidia is a name associated with gaming and professional grade graphics cards, but the company has long produced GPUs for servers and data centers playing host to graphically intensive applications and workloads.

However, the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs has seen Nvidia graphics cards put to use supporting the training of deep learning neural networks, the machine learning process that sits behind smart systems and artificial intelligence (AI) based apps and services such as the Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.

As such, the growth of machine learning is likely to be a factor that is helping drive the use of Nvidia GPUs in data centres, given running major artificial neural networks takes a lot of compute power, regularly found in big server stacks.

Equally, the Nvidia’s strong performance in the data centre arena means it has a robust business upon which is can build more innovative products, such as its Metropolis smart city AI platform designed to better analyse video feeds in urban areas, or the company’s work with drivreless car tech and smart embedded systems.

At the same time the cloud is increasingly underpinning Nvidia’s products and services, so growth in that sector with undoubtedly lead to the company improving its data centre orientated products and thus bolster its other services further down the line including AI tech.

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