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NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)
NVIDIA is the AI computing company which invented Graphics Processing Unit in 1999, the engine of computer graphics and GPU deep learning.
The need for expanding PC gaming market, developing parallel computing, & redefining modern computer graphics lead to the invention of GPU.
NVIDIA’s product includes:
Products
- DGX-2
- DGX-1
- DGX Station
- Data Science Workstation
- Tesla
- T4 Enterprise Server
- Jetson
- Developer
- NVIDIA TITAN RTX
- Quadro GV100
- Drive PX
- Volta Architecture
- NGC
It also provides software like:
- CUDA-X
- Deep Learning SDK
- Deep Learning Frameworks
- NVIDIA DIGITS
On 13 February 2020, NVIDIA surpassed its earnings expectation for the FYQ4 and full year 2020 ended 26 January 2020.
The company reported a 41% growth in its revenue during Q4 FY2020 to US$ 3.11 billion year over year, as a result of record revenue in its artificial intelligence-driven data center platform. The result reflects the upside in its data center & gaming business. However, for the full year, the revenue declined by 7% to US$10.9 billion.
The revenue from the gaming business increased during the quarter by 56% to US$1.49 billion YoY while declined 10% sequentially. Full year gaming revenue was 12% lower than the previous corresponding year.
The company noted strong demand for its desktop & notebook GPUs. The gaming is flourishing, and the preferred game of the gamers is GeForce.
A double-digit growth was recorded from the gaming laptops for the eight’s consecutive quarter, and it continues to grow. During the holiday period retailers provided a record one hundred and twenty-five gaming laptops based on NVIDIA GPUs. It went up from 94 previous year with the Max-Q designs almost double.
The company also launched the first 14-inch GeForce RTX laptop of the world with Asus. It also expanded its Studio line-up of laptops for the fast-rising population.
In early February 2020, the company launched GeForce NOW cloud gaming service powered by GeForce. It is the first cloud gaming service to provide ray-traced games and the only open platform where the gamers can enjoy the games they already have & use their current store accounts, and they are not required to repurchase games. GeForce NOW facilitates PC games on Macs, PCs, Windows, Televisions, mobile phones & shortly on Chromebooks.
The company aims to grow its GeForce gaming to additional gamers. Around 80% of GeForce NOW gamers are playing on underpowered Personal Computers or gadgets with Android or Mac OS. With GeForce NOW, the players can love PC gaming on a GeForce GPU via cloud. Further, the company collaborated with Tencent to bring PC gaming in the cloud to China, which is known to be the biggest gaming market in the world. Tencent is the largest gaming platform in the world.
From the data centre, the company recorded a revenue of US$968 million, up 43% YoY and 33% sequentially. The full fiscal year, revenue from 20 datacenter increased by 2% to $2.98 billion as compared to the previous year, driven by hyperscale, and vertical industry & customers.
NVIDIA, inference platform T4 reported another solid quarter with shipment up 4 times YoY as a result of public cloud implementations, & edge AI video analytics applications.
A Glance at NVIDIA’s Platform Performance:
CFO, Colette Kress, in her commentary, stated that year-on-year rise in gaming is because of higher sales of GeForce GPUs and SoCs used for the gaming platform. SoCs stands for systems on a chip.
The year on year growth in Professional visualization is the shows the strength in desktop and notebook workstation and year-on-year growth in the data centre was because of hyperscale and vertical industry end customers.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
On 13 February 2020, Google announced that it completed the acquisition of Looker for US$ 2.6 billion. Looker is an enterprise platform for business intelligence, data applications, & embedded analytics. Google, along with Looker, would provide end-users with a complete analytics solution that combines as well as visualizes understandings at every level of their business.
There are hundreds of clients who are dependent on Google Cloud & Looker for making a smarter business judgment.
According to Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, the acquisition of Looker would uniquely position the company to address the demand for data analytics & business intelligence of even more enterprises globally, across all industries. Through Looker, the company would boost Google Cloud’s analytics & data warehouse skills, comprising BigQuery, allowing its customers to tackle some of their strongest business challenges, faster with full control of data.
Both companies work on the same philosophy and provide an open solution and assist customers wherever they are. It could be on Google Cloud, in other public cloud or on sites.
On 13 February 2020, The UK's Competition and Markets Authority cleared the acquisition of Looker Data Science, Inc after a comprehensive review.
According to Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the supply business intelligence or BI tools of Google & Looker Data enable organisation to explore a wide array of business data which includes data related to sales, finance & advertising.
For Looker, BI tools are their key focus while Google provides this feature along with other software as well as other internet-based products & services like online search advertising, web analytics & cloud-based data storage.
CMA explored various methods in which the merger might affect the competition adversely. The first was the loss of direct competition amongst both the businesses in the supply of Business Intelligence (BI) tools which could result either in enhanced prices or drop in quality. However, UK competition regulator, found that there are lower chances of this scenario as Google & Looker are not regarded as near rivals by businesses utilizing BI tools, who can still opt from other providers like Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle, SAP & IBM.
Competition and Markets Authority also suspected Google leveraging its market strength in web analytics and online broadcasting to drive BI competitors to quit the market.
Though Google has the capacity to give a tough time to competitors for using its generated data, which might be required by rivals for doing online advertising and web analysis, there seems to be no incentive for the company for doing so.
