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> today's mighty 5080 Consumer GPUs really are not where the money is. It’s only a tiny fraction of Nvidia’s revenue, and much lower margin. Datacenter GPUs ar

> today's mighty 5080 Consumer GPUs really are not where the money is. It’s only a tiny fraction of Nvidia’s revenue, and much lower margin. Datacenter GPUs are where the volume and margins are.

deeringc 1y ago
I would have expected that consumer GPUs still have higher volume, but that Datacenter GPUs have much, much higher margin and therefore significantly higher revenue and profit. Is that not the case?
- raincole 1y ago
  Datacenter GPUs definitely amount to a bigger volumn in 2025[0]. But even when it wasn't the case, Nvidia had been running at a very high margin for years. [0]: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-second-quarter-fiscal-2026 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia... Out of $46B about $41B is from datacenter.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  If Nvidia made SoC GPUs for mobile devides, then they'd might have higher volume, depending on market share. But gaming and workstation PCs that benefit from a high-performance discrete GPU are a pretty niche market these days, whether laptop or desktop.
  - aprdm 1y ago
    It powers the nintendo switch.
raincole 1y ago
Nvidia had a very high gross margin % (for a hardware company) of ~50% way before AI hype. Even before A100.
einsteinx2 1y ago
You’re not wrong, but Nvidia’s consumer cards also still have pretty massive profit margins all things considered. It’s just they have obscene profit margins in the data center cards that make the consumer cards look small by comparison.
- seec 1y ago
  Yeah but that's mostly because they dominate the benchmarks. And part of it is better hardware engineering but also part of it is coupling with optimized software bits that they pushed to devs very well. It was very well done and strategic on their part but realistically without that they are not that much better than AMD and the margins would be much smaller if it had 1-to-1 compatibility as an x86 has. Also, since improvements have been plateauing and entry level is becoming enough for more and more people the margins are going to diminish even more, high-end GPU is going to become even more niche overtime IMO. So, I'd say he is not wrong in spirit, the timeline is just bigger than expected.

> today's mighty 5080 Consumer GPUs really are not where the money is. It’s only a tiny fraction of Nvidia’s revenue, and much lower margin. Datacenter GPUs are where the volume and margins are.

deeringc 1y ago

I would have expected that consumer GPUs still have higher volume, but that Datacenter GPUs have much, much higher margin and therefore significantly higher revenue and profit. Is that not the case?

raincole 1y ago
Datacenter GPUs definitely amount to a bigger volumn in 2025[0]. But even when it wasn't the case, Nvidia had been running at a very high margin for years. [0]: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-second-quarter-fiscal-2026 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia... Out of $46B about $41B is from datacenter.
Sharlin 1y ago
If Nvidia made SoC GPUs for mobile devides, then they'd might have higher volume, depending on market share. But gaming and workstation PCs that benefit from a high-performance discrete GPU are a pretty niche market these days, whether laptop or desktop.
- aprdm 1y ago
  It powers the nintendo switch.

raincole 1y ago

Nvidia had a very high gross margin % (for a hardware company) of ~50% way before AI hype. Even before A100.

einsteinx2 1y ago

You’re not wrong, but Nvidia’s consumer cards also still have pretty massive profit margins all things considered. It’s just they have obscene profit margins in the data center cards that make the consumer cards look small by comparison.

seec 1y ago
Yeah but that's mostly because they dominate the benchmarks. And part of it is better hardware engineering but also part of it is coupling with optimized software bits that they pushed to devs very well. It was very well done and strategic on their part but realistically without that they are not that much better than AMD and the margins would be much smaller if it had 1-to-1 compatibility as an x86 has. Also, since improvements have been plateauing and entry level is becoming enough for more and more people the margins are going to diminish even more, high-end GPU is going to become even more niche overtime IMO. So, I'd say he is not wrong in spirit, the timeline is just bigger than expected.