Nvidia’s gaming division underwhelmed Wall Street: It’s still bringing in about as much money as Dr Pepper
It wasn’t too long ago that Nvidia’s gaming division was its primary money maker.
When Nvidia reported its third-quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon, the company’s once golden goose gaming division posted sales growth of 30% year over year. That still wasn’t enough to beat Wall Street’s expectations.
Q3 gaming revenue reached $4.27 billion, missing analyst estimates by about 4% and coming in comically below the company’s data center revenue of $51.2 billion. But just three years ago, the two divisions were much closer.
Nvidia didn’t have much to say about gaming in its earnings call. Its Blackwell chip momentum continued, inventories are normal heading into the holidays, and Steam recently broke its concurrent user record. The company didn’t update user numbers for GeForce Now, its cloud gaming business. (The subscription service had 25 million members in early 2023.)
But, if Nvidia didn’t have an economy-boosting data center division to brag about, it might point out that $4.27 billion in revenue is still quite a beefy number. Wall Street expects Nvidia gaming to book more than $16 billion in revenue in its current fiscal year — a figure that would represent growth of more than 40% from 2024. In the third quarter, the segment posted higher sales figures than the most recent overall quarterly sales of companies like MGM Resorts, Whirlpool, Gap, and Kohl’s.
