Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs are selling well, but its AI GPU sales are ridiculous

Enlarge / Nvidia’s AI-accelerating GPUs are driving its revenue numbers to new heights. (credit: Nvidia)

Most Ars readers still probably know Nvidia best for its decades-old GeForce graphics cards for gaming PCs, but these days Nvidia’s server GPU business makes GeForce look like a hobby project.

That’s the takeaway from Nvidia’s Q3 earnings report, which shows Nvidia’s revenue up 206 percent from the same quarter last year and 34 percent from an already-very-good Q2. Of the company’s $18.12 billion in revenue, $14.51 billion was generated by its data center division, which includes AI-accelerating chips like the H200 Tensor Core GPU as well as other cloud and server offerings.

And though GeForce revenue was a much smaller $2.86 billion, this was still a solid recovery from the same quarter of Nvidia’s fiscal 2023, when GeForce GPUs earned just $1.51 billion and were down 51 percent compared to fiscal 2022. Nvidia has released several new mainstream GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs this year, including the $299 RTX 4060. And while these more affordable GPUs aren’t staggering upgrades from previous-generation cards, Steam Hardware Survey data shows the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti are being adopted pretty quickly, more than can be said of competing GPUs like AMD’s RX 7600 or Intel’s Arc series.