Report: Analysts Hope New Data Center Product Can Return Nvidia to Growth

A slowdown in GPU purchasing by cryptocurrency miners caused a deceleration in revenue growth for Nvidia. But analysts are hopeful the company will soon release a new product for data centers that will get it back to growth, MarketWatch reported.

Yet, a 7-nanometer data center chip isn’t coming as soon as some analysts have hoped. Nvidia is now more likely to launch that product sometime in the first half of 2020, according to Raymond James analyst Chris Caso, whose note was quoted in the MarketWatch report.

William Stein, with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, wrote that he expected Nvidia to announce one new product in December and another one in March, according to the report. Whether one would be an entire computer (as opposed to both being processors), Stein said he did not know.

Nvidia’s largest business is gaming. Data center is its second largest.

So far this year, the company reported two consecutive quarters of revenue declines from last year. Wall Street analysts expect that this Thursday it will report the same for the third quarter.

Nvidia’s data center revenue was down 10 percent year over year in the first quarter and 14 percent in the second, according to MarketWatch.

Besides the crypto market turbulence, some of the slowdown can be attributed to weakened demand for its GPUs from Chinese hyperscale platforms which like American hyperscalers buy GPUs for their data centers primarily to train machine-learning models, with some renting the hardware out as cloud services.

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But Raymond James’ Caso said that “5G-related infrastructure builds” by smaller players involving server GPUs were picking up, compensating for some of the slowdown in the data center business, according to MarketWatch.