What's happening: Shares of graphics chip company NVIDIA (NVDA 0.48%) jumped on Friday after the company reported its second-quarter results. While a one-time charge took a bite out of earnings, the company managed a massive revenue beat, reporting $1.15 billion of revenue, up 4.5% year over year and $140 million higher than analysts were expecting. Previous guidance from the company had called for revenue of just $1.01 billion. At 11:30 Friday morning, the stock was up about 10%.
Why it's happening: The PC market slumped during the second quarter, and NVIDIA's ability to grow revenue despite PC weakness demonstrates that the gaming PC market is largely detached from the PC market as a whole. Total GPU revenue grew by 9% year-over-year, while gaming revenue jumped 59%, driven by the launch of the high-end GTX 980 Ti. While rival AMD launched new graphics cards during the quarter, this appears to have had no effect on NVIDIA's gaming business.
Other parts of NVIDIA's business didn't perform as well. Sales of Quadro professional GPUs declined, and HPC and cloud revenue slumped by 15% year over year, with NVIDIA blaming the timing of major deep learning projects that utilize the company's Tesla GPUs for the shortfall. Tegra sales also fell, declining by 19% year over year, with strong growth in automotive sales unable to make up for weakness elsewhere.
During the second quarter, NVIDIA took a $0.19-per-share charge related to winding down its modem operations, as well as a $0.02-per-share charge related to the recall of SHIELD tablets. On a non-GAAP basis, the company reported EPS of $0.34, up 13% year over year. Going forward, the company expects revenue of $1.18 billion during the third quarter, down about 3.7% year over year.
NVIDIA's GPU business held up extremely well despite weakness in the PC market, and so far, AMD's new graphics cards haven't done much to derail the company's gaming business. Expectations were likely low given NVIDIA's poor prior guidance, but given the size of the revenue beat, it's not surprising that investors have sent the stock soaring.
