Thursday, November 18, 2021
Arm takeover still planned
Chip requirement brings Nvidia massive growth
With graphics cards and chips for applications with artificial intelligence, Nvidia comes across a gold mine. Business with car manufacturers is stalling, however, because vehicles cannot be finished due to missing other parts.
The high demand for chips for data centers and computer games brings the semiconductor specialist Nvidia strong growth. In the past quarter, the US company’s revenue rose 50 percent year-on-year to $ 7.1 billion. Profits jumped 84 percent to $ 2.46 billion, as Nvidia announced after the US market closed on Wednesday.
In gaming, where Nvidia’s graphics cards are popular, business grew 42 percent to $ 3.2 billion. The business with chips for data centers increased by 55 percent to a good 2.9 billion dollars. Nvidia’s technology is used, among other things, for applications with artificial intelligence. In the business with car manufacturers, Nvidia is also slowed down by the bottlenecks in components, because of which vehicles cannot be finished. The quarterly sales of the division fell by eleven percent to 135 million dollars.
For the current quarter, the group expects further growth overall: The sales forecast of 7.4 billion dollars exceeded the expectations of analysts, who had expected around 6.9 billion dollars. The share rose in after-hours trading by almost five percent. The price has more than doubled since the beginning of the year.
Despite concerns from competition watchdogs, Nvidia reiterated plans to purchase British chip designer Arm, whose technology is in virtually all smartphones. One continues to believe in the advantages of the planned takeover, emphasized CFO Colette Kress in a conference call with analysts. The US competition regulator FTC also has concerns. Possible concessions are being discussed. The deal is also being examined in more depth in the EU and Great Britain.
Companies such as Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung design their own processors for mobile devices on the basis of Arm’s chip architectures. Some of Arm’s customers fear that the chip designer could become more focused on Nvidia’s interests after the takeover. Nvidia denies this.
Company boss Jensen Huang also sees great future business in Nvidia’s “Omniverse” – a platform for the virtual simulation of real environments such as factories, in which processes and procedures can be optimized.