Nvidia's T4 and V100 GPU products drive double-digit datacenter revenue growth, establishing these lines as foundational to AI infrastructure.

Nvidia reported record data center revenue of $968 million in the fourth quarter of its 2020 fiscal year, a 43 percent increase over the same period last year, moving the Santa Clara, California-based company from recovery mode into double-digit growth. The company's overall fourth-quarter revenue reached $3.1 billion, a 40.7 percent increase from the same period last year and $130 million higher than analyst expectations. Net earnings were $1.89 per share, beating analyst estimates by 22 cents. The company's stock price rose as much as 6.40 percent in after-hours trading Thursday following the announcement.

CEO Jensen Huang attributed the growth to record sales of Tesla V100 training GPUs and T4 inference GPUs, which are driven by the need to accelerate artificial intelligence and deep learning workloads. According to CFO Collette Kress, T4 sales in the fourth quarter were four times greater than the same period last year. Huang stated, "The primary driver for our growth is AI," and expressed confidence in Nvidia's long-term data center prospects, declaring: "I believe that in the future the data center will all be accelerated."

Huang identified "four fundamental dynamics" behind Nvidia's AI growth: breakthroughs in AI models for natural language understanding and conversational AI, AI deployments moving into production with inference workloads, growing adoption from hyperscale and vertical customers, and the emergence of processing AI at the edge. He argued that GPU acceleration would become essential across all computing workloads, noting that CPU performance scaling has plateaued. "CPU scaling has really slowed. There's no two ways about it. It's not a marketing thing. It's a physics thing," Huang said, citing the end of Dennard scaling and echoing industry observers who say Moore's law is dead.

Looking ahead, Nvidia projected first-quarter fiscal 2021 revenue of $3 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, down $100 million from an earlier forecast due to expected impacts from the coronavirus outbreak on the company's gaming and data center units. Regarding supply constraints, Huang said while Nvidia is "in pretty good shape," the company "won't have ample supply" and will need to monitor the situation closely. "All of us have to do a better job forecasting," Kress added.