Gaming was once Nvidia’s golden goose. Now it’s the most low-key $11 billion business you can imagine.

Before it was worth four Walmarts, or newsrooms planned shiny packages around its earnings calls, or it was a company whose market cap could lose $560 billion in a day and not go Enron-mode, Nvidia was in the business of video game chips.

According to the fresh earnings report it released Wednesday, gaming is now just 8% of Nvidia’s annual revenue. It was 50% in fiscal year 2020. In Q4, gaming revenue fell to $2.5 billion, down 11% from last year. Annually, gaming revenue still grew 9% to $11.4 billion for fiscal year 2025.

Casting a $115.2 billion shadow over gaming: Nvidia’s AI-powered data center business, which grew 142% year over year.

But without gaming — and to a non-negligible degree, quite literally the game “Quake” — Nvidia would almost certainly not boast the stratospheric market cap it carries today. The prevalence of PC gaming and the desire from players to endlessly boost their rigs and more crisply render grass in games like “Skyrim” carried Nvidia for the first three decades or so of its existence. 

Through graphics cards, the company made its way into gaming consoles: its NV2A GPU chip powered Microsoft’s original Xbox, and Sony collaborated with Nvidia for the PlayStation 3’s graphics card. In 2013, Nvidia launched its own console: Shield, a handheld game-streaming device. Today, an Nvidia mobile chip is in every Nintendo Switch, and an Nvidia processor will reportedly be in the Switch 2, expected to sell 13 million units this year.

Over the years, Nvidia dumped all that gaming cash into research on more powerful chips, fueling other revenue streams like autos, crypto mining, and its golden goose: data center hardware.

Nvidia entered the data center business in 2008 and is said to have “bet [its] future on artificial intelligence” about five years later. It would take another decade for the data center division to become Nvidia’s biggest revenue generator (2022). Data center revenue now makes up 88% of the company’s overall revenue.

Gaming was once that cash cow. In 2007, still primarily a company by and for gamers, Nvidia was riding high on its flagship GPU business. Its shares were up 2,100% from their 1999 IPO price, and Nvidia was named Forbes’ Company of the Year.

But nothing gold (did you know GPUs contain gold?) can stay.

Still, pivoting toward greener, artificially generated pastures doesn’t mean Nvidia has given up on gaming. The quarterly revenue generated by the division is in the league with total revenues for names like Hess ($3.1 billion), Caesars Entertainment ($2.9 billion), and Expedia ($3.2 billion) — not exactly shabby company.

Its 5-year-old cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, allows users to stream games they own (or access through subscriptions like Game Pass) via a high-powered virtual rig, eliminating the need to build a PC. The service had 25 million subscribers two years ago. Nvidia hasn’t updated that figure, but bringing Xbox PC games to the service (including “Call of Duty”) probably didn’t hurt numbers. 

There are plenty of signs that gaming isn’t the company’s top priority, though. Late last year, Nvidia introduced a 100-hour monthly cap on GeForce Now playtime (a threshold it says 94% of players don’t meet). And since late January, GeForce Now memberships outside of day passes have been “sold out” for new subscribers on Nvidia’s website.

A company spokesperson on Reddit said that a payment provider transition was behind the new membership pause and that the full transition would take a “minimum of five weeks,” with billing waived for existing subscribers in the meantime. 

For a public company, that seems like a “this doesn’t really matter” kind of timeline. It makes sense why it wouldn’t: though not at all a poor performer, Nvidia’s gaming division is quickly becoming a nonfactor in its overall revenue. With virtually every tech company continuing to pour cash into AI, Nvidia’s data center business isn’t showing signs of slowing down.