- Revenue is expected to be $3.65 billion, plus or minus 2 percent. Mellanox is expected to contribute a low-teens percentage of combined second quarter revenue.
- GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be 58.6 percent and 66.0 percent, respectively, plus or minus 50 basis points. The sequential decline in GAAP gross margins primarily reflects an increase in acquisition-related costs, most of which are non-recurring in nature.
- GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses are expected to be approximately $1.52 billion and $1.04 billion, respectively. The sequential change in GAAP operating expenses reflects an increase in stock-based compensation and acquisition-related costs. GAAP and non-GAAP operating expenses for the full year, which will include Mellanox starting with the second quarter, are expected at approximately $5.7 billion and $4.1 billion, respectively.
- GAAP and non-GAAP other income and expense are expected to be an expense of approximately $50 million and $45 million, respectively.
- GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates are both expected to be 9 percent, plus or minus 1 percent, excluding any discrete items. GAAP discrete items include excess tax benefits or deficiencies related to stock-based compensation, which are expected to generate variability on a quarter by quarter basis.
Highlights
Since its previous earnings report, NVIDIA has achieved progress in these areas:
Gaming
- First-quarter revenue was $1.34 billion, down 10 percent sequentially and up 27 percent from a year earlier.
- Launched Minecraft with RTX as an open beta on Windows 10, bringing real-time ray tracing, more realistic materials and DLSS 2.0 to the world’s best-selling videogame.
- Announced the release of more than 100 new laptop models powered by NVIDIA GeForce® GPUs, bringing the RTX 2080 SUPER™ and RTX 2070 SUPER high-end GPUs to laptops for the first time, and enabling RTX 2060 laptop price points as low as $999 for a mass market audience.
- Expanded the RTX Studio lineup with 10 new laptops from Acer, Gigabyte, MSI and Razer, powered by new GeForce RTX SUPER GPUs.
- Released DLSS 2.0, the second generation of its deep learning neural network, which allows gamers on RTX GPUs to boost frame rates as much as two times and increase image resolution for supported games.
- Expanded NVIDIA GeForce NOW™, which provides access to 650 games, with 1,500 more waiting to get on board, and has added 2 million users since going live in February.
Data Center
- First-quarter revenue was $1.14 billion, up 18 percent sequentially and up 80 percent from a year earlier.
- Introduced the NVIDIA A100™ data center GPU, the first based on the new NVIDIA Ampere architecture, now in full production and shipping worldwide.
- Launched the NVIDIA DGX A100™ – a 5-petaflops AI system that delivers elastic, software-defined data center infrastructure for the most demanding workloads – with the first system being used by Argonne National Laboratory on COVID-19 research.
- Introduced two products for the NVIDIA EGX™ Edge AI platform — the EGX A100 for larger commercial off-the-shelf servers – combining the latest A100 GPU and Mellanox SmartNIC technology — and the EGX Jetson Xavier NX for micro-edge servers.
- Released NVIDIA Jarvis™, an application framework enabling companies to offer real-time language-based AI services customized for their own industry, products and customers.
- Collaborated with the open-source community to bring end-to-end GPU acceleration to Apache Spark 3.0, the world’s largest data analytics platform used by more than 500,000 data scientists.
- Announced NVIDIA Merlin™, an application framework that democratizes AI-based deep recommender systems.
- Launched the Mellanox ConnectX-6® Lx SmartNIC – a highly secure, efficient 25/50 gigabit per second Ethernet smart network interface controller.
Professional Visualization
- First-quarter revenue was $307 million, down 7 percent sequentially and up 15 percent from a year earlier.
- Powered Autodesk’s latest 3D visualization software, VRED 2021, with NVIDIA Quadro RTX — giving designers the ability to create with interactive ray tracing and AI-powered denoising.
- Accelerated Altair’s AccuSolve and TheaRender engineering software with NVIDIA CUDA to speed the creation of high-quality simulations.
- Brought Quadro professional graphics to HP’s ZBook Create and ZBook Studio mobile workstation lineup, offering outstanding performance, mobility and reliability to creatives.
Automotive
- First-quarter revenue was $155 million, down 5 percent sequentially and down 7 percent from a year earlier.
- Announced that the Xpeng P7 all-electric sports sedan, with production deliveries beginning next month, uses the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX platform and DRIVE OS software to deliver level 3 automated driving.
COVID-19 Efforts
- NVIDIA and its employees have committed to donate more than $10 million to those affected during this period.
- Accelerated promotions and raises for employees by several months.
- Released AI models in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health to help researchers detect COVID-19 in lung scans.
- Joined the White House’s COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, alongside leaders from the U.S. government, industry and academia, to accelerate COVID-related research.
- Provided a free 90-day license to NVIDIA Parabricks™, a genomics software stack that uses GPUs to accelerate the analysis of gene-sequencing data, to researchers working on COVID-related topics.
CFO Commentary
Commentary on the quarter by Colette Kress, NVIDIA’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, as well as a presentation of first-quarter earnings, are available at http://investor.nvidia.com/.
Conference Call and Webcast Information
NVIDIA will conduct a conference call with analysts and investors to discuss its first quarter fiscal 2021 financial results and current financial prospects today at 2:30 p.m. Pacific time (5:30 p.m. Eastern time). A live webcast (listen-only mode) of the conference call will be accessible at NVIDIA’s investor relations website, http://investor.nvidia.com. The webcast will be recorded and available for replay until NVIDIA’s conference call to discuss its financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2021.
Non-GAAP Measures
To supplement NVIDIA’s condensed consolidated financial statements presented in accordance with GAAP, the company uses non-GAAP measures of certain components of financial performance. These non-GAAP measures include non-GAAP gross profit, non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating expenses, non-GAAP income from operations, non-GAAP other income net, non-GAAP other expense net, non-GAAP income tax expense, non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP net income, or earnings, per diluted share, and free cash flow. In order for NVIDIA’s investors to be better able to compare its current results with those of previous periods, the company has shown a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures. These reconciliations adjust the related GAAP financial measures to exclude stock-based compensation expense, acquisition-related and other costs, legal settlement costs, losses from non-affiliated investments, interest expense related to amortization of debt discount, and the associated tax impact of these items, where applicable. Free cash flow is calculated as GAAP net cash provided by operating activities less purchase of property and equipment and intangible assets. NVIDIA believes the presentation of its non-GAAP financial measures enhances the user’s overall understanding of the company’s historical financial performance. The presentation of the company’s non-GAAP financial measures is not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the company’s financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP, and the company’s non-GAAP measures may be different from non-GAAP measures used by other companies.
