NVIDIA Q3 2020 earnings: Record $4.73 billion revenue drive by gaming and data center sectors

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 review
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 review (Image credit: Harish Jonnalagadda / Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • NVIDIA today reported $4.73 billion revenue during its fiscal year's third quarter.
  • This is up 57% compared to last year at the same time.
  • Record revenue in data center and gaming sectors helped drive numbers.

NVIDIA reported its 2020 Q3 financial results today, with a record $4.73 billion in revenue for the period. That breaks down to $2.91 non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS), coming in well above $1.78 EPS in Q3 of last year. This also beats Wall Street expectations, which had earnings around $2.58 per share and revenue of $4.41 billion for Q3.

This record revenue was driven heavily by gaming and data center revenue, each setting records in their own right. The gaming sector reported $2.27 billion revenue — a 37% boost compared to last year — while the data center reported $1.90 billion revenue, a whopping 162% boost compared to last year. NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang had this to say:

NVIDIA is firing on all cylinders, achieving record revenues in Gaming, Data Center and overall. The new NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU provides our largest-ever generational leap and demand is overwhelming. NVIDIA RTX has made ray tracing the new standard in gaming. We are continuing to raise the bar with NVIDIA AI. Our A100 compute platform is ramping fast, with the top cloud companies deploying it globally. We swept the industry AI inference benchmark, and our customers are moving some of the world's most popular AI services into production, powered by NVIDIA technology.

While the automotive sector is up 13% compared to last quarter, it's down 23% from the previous year. Professional visualization is also up 16% compared to last quarter, though it's down 27% compared to the previous year. That's not a big surprise, as the global temperature bodes far better for gamers and data centers than it does cars. Windows Central's Executive Editor Daniel Rubino was on the TD Ameritrade network earlier today to discuss NVIDIA earnings expectations.

As mentioned, NVIDIA has been busy in the gaming sector, releasing RTX 30-series GPUs that make up our list of the best graphics card options, as well as supporting software like NVIDIA Reflex and NVIDIA Broadcast. The acquisition of Arm Limited by NVIDIA sets it up well to become a leader in AI computing, which will no doubt boost margins in the coming years.

Cale Hunt
Contributor

Cale Hunt brings to Windows Central more than eight years of experience writing about laptops, PCs, accessories, games, and beyond. If it runs Windows or in some way complements the hardware, there’s a good chance he knows about it, has written about it, or is already busy testing it.