NVIDIA reports strong Q4 earnings with datacenter and AI business units surging, demonstrating explosive demand for GPU infrastructure.

NVIDIA reported strong fiscal 2017 financial results, with quarterly revenue increasing 55 percent to $2.17 billion compared to the same period a year ago, and full-year revenue rising 38 percent year-over-year to $6.91 billion. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter reached $1.13, compared to $0.52 a year earlier, while the full-year metric was $3.06, representing an 83 percent increase. Nearly all business sectors contributed to the growth, with Gaming revenue increasing 66 percent to $1.35 billion and the Automotive sector increasing 38 percent to $128 million. The Datacenter division achieved the largest year-over-year growth, increasing 205 percent to $296 million.

The company's strong performance was driven in part by the 2016 launch of its Pascal architecture GPU lineup, which became available for both mobile and desktop platforms and brought affordable VR-ready graphics cards to the market. NVIDIA GPUs have become widely used for deep learning applications, with the Tesla family contributing significantly to company revenue. As NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang stated, "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."

During Q4, NVIDIA launched several new products including the GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti, a new SHIELD TV, and the GeForce NOW Pascal GPU game streaming service. The company also released the Quadro GP100 GPU for the professional visualization market. In the automotive sector, NVIDIA expanded its presence with key partnerships with Mercedes-Benz and Audi for self-driving capabilities using the DRIVE PX 2 AI platform. The company's stock price increased 360 percent over the past twelve months.