Nvidia Corp. extended its hot streak with its second-quarter financial results today, easily beating expectations thanks to strong gains in gaming, data center and professional visualization.

The company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of $1.04 per share on revenue of $6.51 billion, up an impressive 68% from the same period one year ago. Wall Street analysts were looking for a profit of $1.02 per share on sales of $6.33 billion.

Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang (pictured) said the strong performance was a result of the company’s “pioneering work” to advance graphics, scientific computing and artificial intelligence.

“Enabled by the Nvidia platform, developers are creating the most impactful technologies of our time – from natural language understanding and recommender systems, to autonomous vehicles and logistic centers, to digital biology and climate science, to metaverse worlds that obey the laws of physics,” Huang said.

Nvidia has been enjoying a period of sustained growth thanks to huge demand for the semiconductors it builds that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. The company specializes in graphics processing units that have become increasingly important in areas such as AI, the data center, gaming and cryptocurrency mining.

The company’s graphics business, which accounts for the graphics cards it sells, saw revenue climb 87%, to $3.91 billion in the quarter. Within that segment, gaming sales rose 85%, to $3.06 billion.

Nvidia has struggled with supply chain issues since late last year, and its latest line of graphics cards sells out as fast as it hits the stores. In May, the company said it expected supply challenges to persist for the remainder of the year, and today it said it was seeing longer lead times throughout its supply chain.

The massive increase in gaming sales this quarter was thanks to strong demand for both its GeForce graphics card and the GPUs it sells for console makers.

Nvidia’s data center business performed well too, with revenue up 35% from a year ago, to $2.37 billion. The company attributed the gain to strong demand from cloud data center operators and industrial devices.

The professional visualization business, which includes graphics cards for high-end professional laptops, was another strong performer as sales jumped 156%, to $519 million. The company’s automotive segment grew 37%, to $152 million.

The only blot on Nvidia’s quarter was cryptocurrency revenue, which came in at $266 million, some way below the $400 million in sales the company forecast three months ago.

Nvidia’s CMP cryptocurrency cards are a new product, launched earlier this year. The idea behind it was to ensure that crypto miners wouldn’t buy up GPUs meant for gaming and cause shortages. Nvidia also applied software to its gaming GPUs to throttle their performance when used for mining.

“Nvidia is really hitting on all cylinders,” said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “I was most surprised to see the growth in gaming. There have been some questions as to whether the gaming numbers are really crypto numbers, but with 80% of its new cards being low hash rate, this look to be real gaming demand.”

Nvidia had a busy quarter on the product front, launching a new RTX A2000 graphics card and a major expansion to its Omniverse hyper-realistic graphics collaboration platform, which integrates with Blender, an open-source 3D animation tool.

The company also announced general availability of a key new AI research platform aimed at large enterprises, called Nvidia Base Command. Nvidia’s Tensor RT software also received an update during the quarter, as did its HGX AI supercomputing platform.

There was a quick update on Nvidia’s pending $40 billion acquisition of the U.K. chip designer Arm Ltd. in today’s conference call, with Huang saying he’s confident the deal will eventually be permitted, though he admitted it may take longer than the 18 months originally anticipated. The transaction has been opposed by a number of Nvidia’s chipmaking competitors on concerns they may lose access to some of Arm’s critical technology.

“Although some Arm licensees have expressed concerns or objected to the transaction, and discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, we are confident in the deal and that regulators should recognize the benefits of the acquisition to Arm, its licensees, and the industry,” Nvidia said.

For the next quarter, Nvidia is guiding for revenue of $6.8 billion, ahead of Wall Street’s consensus of $6.53 billion.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE