Nvidia's quarterly revenue surged more than 50 percent for the second straight quarter, helped by rising demand for its graphics chips datacenter and professional visualization, as well as for Tegra
automotive systems.
The company also forecast revenue of $1.90 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, for the current quarter.
"We had a great finish to a record year, with continued strong growth across all our businesses," said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "Our GPU computing platform is enjoying rapid adoption in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, gaming, and autonomous vehicles.
"Deep learning on NVIDIA GPUs, a breakthrough approach to AI, is helping to tackle challenges such as self-driving cars, early cancer detection and weather prediction. We can now see that GPU-based deep learning will revolutionize major industries, from consumer internet and transportation to health care and manufacturing. The era of AI is upon us," he said.
GPU business revenue for the fourth quarter was $1.85 billion, up
57 percent from a year earlier and up 9 percent sequentially, led
by growth across all platforms, including exceptional growth from
the GeForce GPU gaming and datacenter platforms.
GeForce GPU gaming results were fueled by strong adoption of Nvidia's
latest Pascal architecture.
Datacenter (including Tesla, NVIDIA GRID and DGX-1) was a record $296
million, up 205 percent year on year and up 23 percent sequentially.
This reflects strong demand for deep learning training, cloud and
virtualized computing, and DGX-1 sales.
Tegra business revenue, which included gaming development platforms
and services, was $257 million for the fourth quarter, up 64 percent
from a year ago and up 7 percent sequentially.
Also included was automotive revenue of $128 million, primarily from
infotainment modules, which was up 38 percent from a year earlier and
up 1 percent sequentially.
Fiscal 2017 revenue grew 38 percent to a record $6.91 billion, reflecting growth leading to records in each of Nvidia's market platforms -- Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter, and
Automotive.
GPU business revenue was $5.82 billion, up 39 percent from a year earlier, and Tegra business revenue was $824 million, up 47 percent from a year ago.
License revenue from Nvidia's patent license agreement with Intel remained flat at $66 million for the fourth quarter and $264 million for fiscal 2017.