Nvidia announced its fourth quarter revenue last night, recording a full year revenue of $130.5 billion. This was an increase of 114% year-on-year due to high demand for AI chips. But despite its massive sales growth, many gamers and enthusiasts feel they are ignored, especially as they only mentioned the shortage of the RTX 50 series, but did not explain why it was happening or how it was dealing with the issue.
Team Green’s bread and butter was previously GPU, but the segment was a major part of sales until 2022. However, with the launch of ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has become more accessible to the public, and many tech companies have begun to spend billions of dollars buying the hardware they need to train these models, such as data center GPUs created by Nvidia. Due to this massive demand, the company quickly became the most valuable in the world by its market capitalization.
Nvidia’s data center business accounted for 39.43% of revenue, up from $10.61 billion in December 2021 to approximately $1151.9 billion in three years, accounting for 88.27% of revenue. In comparison, the gaming GPU business has shrunk to $11.35 billion, or 8.7%, from its revenue share of $12.46 billion and 46.31% over the same time frame.
It doesn’t really make much sense for the reason it is experiencing some issues with the RTX 50 Series GPU, especially considering that it records these record numbers on the data center side of its business. Apart from the supply shortage, one retailer says it could take up to 16 weeks to meet pre-orders, so it’s coming back to the RTX 5090 and revives its missing ROPS and even the issues with BSOD and black screens (thankfully just addressed with a driver update).
It’s understandable that the AI business is where money is now, but it’s frustrating for many why Nvidia couldn’t prepare for the massive demand that the RTX 50 series GPU had at launch. The chip shortages during the launch of the RTX 30 Series and RTX 40 Series GPUs were explained by the global supply chain crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, with the relatively stable silicon supply chain now, it is hard to wonder why Nvidia isn’t making enough chips for the consumer side of its business.
At the very least, we had to anticipate and manufacture enough chips to avoid the shortages we are experiencing now. After all, if you have a wealth of RTX 50 Series GPUs, you don’t need to resort to hours (if not days) of line up with a retailer.
With Nvidia currently being washed away with so much cash from the data center business, it’s great that we can afford to spend more on research and development. However, it’s a shame that millions of core fanbase are a shame, especially as many feel that the company has stopped prioritizing PC gamers, especially with the failed launch of the RTX 50 series.
