Tesla Pushes Nvidia Deeper Into The Datacenter

If you are trying to figure out what impact the new "Pascal" family of GPUs is going to have on the business at Nvidia, just take a gander at the recent financial results for the datacenter division of the company. If Nvidia had not spent the better part of a decade building its Tesla compute business, it would be a little smaller and quite a bit less profitable. In the company's first quarter of fiscal 2017, which ended on May 1, Nvidia posted sales of 1.31 billion, up 13 percent from the year ago period, and net income hit 196 million, up 46 percent over the same term. These are the kinds of growth numbers that all IT vendors like to show to Wall Street, especially with profit growth significantly outpacing revenue growth. The datacenter portion of Nvidia, which it only started reporting on separately last year and for which it has given two years of financial results since it has become materially relevant, is growing much faster than the overall business.