Graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. issued a muted outlook and reported a sharp decline in quarterly sales, driven by waning consumer demand for its videogaming chips after a pandemic-fueled boom and the onset of the cryptowinter. America's largest chip company by value on Wednesday said revenue fell 17% to $5.93 billion after gaming-segment sales more than halved in its fiscal third quarter. Net profit was $680 million. The sales were above expectations in a survey of analysts by FactSet, but net profit fell short. A flood of Nvidia's products are being unloaded by people who had used them in calculation-intensive cryptocurrency mining that may be denting demand, Nvidia's Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said.

Kress said customers are using the chips for tasks such as understanding human speech and crunching data to offer customer recommendations. Gaming, Nvidia's biggest market, reported $3.2 billion in sales, up 42% from $2.27 billion in the same quarter last year. The company said it was primarily due to increased sales of its GeForce consumer graphics processors, but the company said supply remained limited. Nvidia's gaming graphics cards now have software that prevents them from being used for cryptocurrency mining, the company said. Nvidia introduced dedicated graphics cards for crypto mining earlier this year to help meet some of the demand.

Graphics-chip maker Nvidia (NVDA) released a fire hose of news at its online GTC conference, detailing advancements in artificial intelligence, computer graphics, robotics and data centers. Nvidia stock reached a buy point Tuesday following positive reviews of the event. Nvidia also announced that its fiscal first-quarter revenue is tracking above the target it provided in its Feb. 24 earnings release. At the time, the company provided a revenue outlook for its first fiscal quarter, ending May 2, of $5.3 billion, plus or minus 2%. In a news release, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said Nvidia is seeing strength across its four market platforms.

Demand for some of Nvidia's chips has been so hot that it has outpaced the company's ability to increase production, adding to chip-supply shortages riling the semiconductor industry. Nvidia's newest graphics cards were a holiday sensation, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said during an earnings call. She added that some inventories are likely to remain low in the first quarter even as Nvidia increases supply. "Throughout our supply chain, stronger demand globally has limited the availability of capacity and components," Ms. Kress said. President Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order directing a broad review of supply chains for semiconductors and other critical materials.

Nvidia reported revenues of $5.0 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter ended January 31, up 61% from a year earlier. The revenues and non-GAAP earnings per share of $3.10 beat expectations as new gaming hardware and AI products generated strong demand. A year ago, Nvidia reported non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.89 on revenues of $3.1 billion. The Santa Clara, California-based company makes graphics processing units (GPUs) that can be used for games, AI, and datacenter computing. While many businesses have been hit hard by the pandemic, Nvidia has seen a boost in those areas.

On December 30, researchers using artificial intelligence systems to comb through media and social platforms detected the spread of an unusual flu-like illness in Wuhan, China. It would be days before the World Health Organization released a risk assessment and a full month before the UN agency declared a global public health emergency for the novel coronavirus. Could the AI systems have accelerated the process and limited, or even arrested, the extent of the COVID-19 pandemic? Clark Freifeld, a Northeastern University computer scientist working with the global disease surveillance platform HealthMap, one of the systems detecting the outbreak, said it remains an open question. "We identified the early signals, but the reality is it's hard to tell when you have an unidentified respiratory illness if it's a really serious situation," said Freifeld.

Graphics processor maker NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) recently reported its second-quarter fiscal 2019 results, with some fantastic outcomes. The company's total sales were up 40% from the year-ago quarter to $3.12 billion, which outpaced analysts' consensus estimate of $3.10 billion. NVIDIA's earnings of $1.76 per share also surpassed Wall Street's expectations of $1.66 per share and were up 91% year over year. Management has done a fantastic job of growing the company's top line, and the second quarter was no exception -- sales from the company's data center, gaming, professional visualization, and automotive segments all set records. To understand NVIDIA's growth and what investors can expect in the months ahead, we have to look beyond the numbers, though.

What do you get when you cross self-driving artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, and public transportation? Local Motors, a manufacturer known for its focus on open-source vehicle designs, unveiled Olli on Thursday at its new facility in National Harbor, Md., a development just outside Washington D.C. To test Olli, Local Motors plans to offer free rides to the public around the development in what is believed to be the first public trial of a completely self-driving vehicle in the United States, reported The Washington Post. In February, the Netherlands launched a fleet of WEpod driverless buses, which can carry six passengers, on the campus of Wageningen University in a central Dutch agricultural town. Miami-Dade County has bought two Olli shuttles, and Las Vegas has bought one.

Shares of graphics chip maker Nvidia (NVDA) are down 6 cents at 35.69, following yesterday's annual meeting with analysts. A webcast replay of presentations CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and other executives, and the Q&A, can be viewed from the company's investor relations page. Huang made the pitch that with new frontiers of machine learning and artificial intelligence, Nvidia "are no longer a co-processor," meaning a handmaid to the PC microprocessor. "There is no workload we run," said Huang, such as a video game. Instead, he said, with the company's programming technology, "CUDA," "we run an application that a developer writes on top of it."