Tesla Partner Nvidia Delves Into AI With Facebook, Alibaba
Tesla ( TSLA ) partner Nvidia ( NVDA ) forged alliances during Q4 with Facebook ( FB ) and Chinese Internet major Alibaba ( BABA ) for speedy artificial intelligence chips, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said late Wednesday on the chipmaker’s earnings conference call. And tech giants Alphabet ( GOOGL ), Microsoft ( MSFT ) and IBM ( IBM ) also are eyeing AI, she said. The arena pits graphics processing units, made by Nvidia and others, against another type of chip called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to power the process. The trend — accelerated machine learning — is good news for GPU-maker Nvidia and Intel ( INTC ), which completed its acquisition of FPGA-maker Altera in December. Fostering AI requires breakneck speed in the data center. Nvidia stock rocketed as much as 12% Thursday, touching a six-week high near 31. Midday on the stock market today , Nvidia stock was up 9%, following Nvidia’s blowout Q4 earnings and its guidance leap. For its fiscal Q4 ended Jan. 31, Nvidia reported 35 cents earnings per share on a record $1.4 billion in sales, flat and up 12%, respectively, vs. the year-earlier quarter, and topping Wall Street expectations. Fiscal 2016 ended with $5.01 billion in sales and $1.08 EPS, up a respective 7% and 4%, to beat the consensus model of 29 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. Nvidia guided above the consensus to $1.26 billion in sales, plus or minus 2%, for the current quarter. That would be up 9.5% year over year, but down 10% sequentially — a measure Rosenblatt analyst Kinngai Chan, in a research note, called “prudent and appropriate.” Chan sees weak China and Asia gaming demand slugging Nvidia in the first half of fiscal 2017. But gaming was the bright spot for Nvidia’s Q4, where sales flew 25% year over year to $810 million. GPU sales, Nvidia’s bread and butter, rose 10% to $1.18 billion. Nvidia Vs. AMD Pretty Close In the second half of the year, Nvidia could outperform after releasing its newest GPU generation, Pascal, says Chan. “We do not foresee any meaningful market share shifts and continue to see a benign pricing environment,” Chan wrote. Likewise, Pacific Crest analyst Michael McConnell doesn’t expect any major shifts in share between Nvidia and GPU rival Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ). Both are deeply entrenched in the gaming world — Facebook-owned Oculus recommends GPUs from either to power its upcoming Rift VR games. “We believe further stock outperformance this year will hinge on company progress with PC GPU total addressable market expansion (VR) … given our belief that GPU share gains vs. Advanced Micro Devices have likely peaked,” McConnell wrote in a research note. He has a sector weigh rating on Nvidia stock. Automotive and data center sales remain healthy growth drivers for Nvidia — up 68% and 10% year over year, respectively — but they only comprise about 13%-14% of total sales, McConnell wrote. Sales stemming from Tesla and Nvidia’s joint accelerator chips are included in the data center total. Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun-Huang sees that as a potential boom market. During Q4, Nvidia announced a hyperscale data center platform that accelerates machine learning (AI). He sees the move to AI as “a brand new computing model.” “There are so many problems that computer science has been trying to solve, which algorithmically are just impossible to solve,” he told analysts on Wednesday’s call. “Using an enormous amount of data to train a neural net … is a pretty exciting computation model.”