저자: Alex소속미상 · 외국인
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엔비디아는 2분기 매출이 19% 감소할 것이라는 경고와 함께 게이밍 매출 급감으로 주가가 하락했다. 암호화폐 채굴 수요 감소와 이더리움 PoS 전환으로 채굴용 GPU 수요가 사라지고, 채굴 종료 후 중고 GPU가 시장에 풀려 게이머 수요를 잠식할 전망이다. 다만 데이터센터 사업은 연 50% 이상 성장 중이라 단기 역풍 이후 장기 회복이 기대된다는 내용이다.
다듬은 글
shares of Nvidia sank on Monday and the number comes out it's pretty terrible crashing over the past two quarters here the stock is really getting beaten up the chip maker warned in preliminary results that its second quarter Revenue would drop by 19 gaming is expected to fall 33 year over year they expect the macro economic conditions to continue I would say this is a clearing event for video Nvidia has a big problem their Gaming revenue is drying up fast and they're expected to lose almost 1.5 billion dollars this quarter alone we'll see just how bad the damage is in a couple weeks when they report their quarterly earnings but what exactly counts as Gaming revenue and is the situation as dire as Wall Street is making it out to be and in a surprising twist could this loss actually be good for NVIDIA in the long term let me explain see Nvidia makes gpus or Graphics processing units which are the chips that bring computer visuals to life the business of making gpus really got started in the 90s video game teams were consistently pushing the limits of personal computers and there was a constant need for more processing power as newer better games kept coming out so in 1999 Nvidia announced the GeForce 256 calling it the world's first Graphics Processing Unit the big idea is that the gpus are specifically designed to process the complex but repetitive calculations associated with generating Graphics taking that workload off of a computer's Central Processing Unit or CPU so a GPU and a CPU are meant to work in parallel instead of having the CPU do everything one step at a time Nvidia is by far the market weeder in gaming gpus with around an 80 market share today Advanced Micro Devices or AMD owns the other roughly 20 percent now let's fast forward to the start of the pandemic in 2020 when the lockdowns first started they halted production lines delivery services and interrupted other areas of the supply chain out of all the industries hit by these supply chain issues computer chips were hit the hardest that year the Auto industry Alone lost over 100 billion dollars because they couldn't get enough chips to put inside their cars at the same time gaming demand skyrocketed since everyone was stuck inside as a result of this lower Supply and higher demand nvidia's revenue from gaming ballooned up to over 3 billion dollars in a single quarter marking an 85 percent increase from the year before but there's another Market that also uses the same gpus as Gamers and that's crypto miners now just to be clear gpus are not the best device to mine cryptocurrencies like ethereum Asics or application specific integrated circuits are the best device the thing is you can't just go to your local mall and buy an Asic even if you could you'd have to put in a lot of work to learn how to set this kind of system up use it and maintain it when something fails so gpus are in that sweet spot of being easy enough to get your hands on and set up good enough to mine crypto and flexible enough to use for other things like gaming if the whole crypto mining thing doesn't work out and because GPU demand is so high you can always get your hands on one try things out and sell it on a second hand market for above retail prices if things don't work that is if you can get your hands on one since Nvidia has about an 80 market share for gpus all the supply chain issues causing chip shortages and all the extra demand from crypto miners affected them much more than any other chip company even worse there's no easy clear-cut way to know who is buying a GPU for gaming versus crypto mining especially since the same one card can be used for both at the end of last year Nvidia CFO Colette Cress spoke with analysts saying that quote our gpus are capable of crypto mining though we don't have visibility into how much this impacts our overall GPU demand end quote so crypto miners put Nvidia between a rock and a hard place their core products saw record sales over the pandemic but not to their core demographic which is Gamers but Gamers weren't the only group of people upset with Nvidia see all of nvidia's GPU sales are reported as revenue from gaming earlier this year Nvidia had to pay a 5.5 million dollar fine as part of a settlement with the SEC according to the SEC filing which started back in 2018 Nvidia didn't properly inform investors about how much of their GPU sales actually went to crypto Miners and what that could mean for GPU demand going forward it's clear from the filing that Nvidia was well aware that crypto mining was driving at least part of their demand and that Senior Management wanted to capture that market but like I just mentioned it's not clear that they had any way to really measure how many gpus were being used for gaming versus crypto mining keep in mind that it's also not clear if Nvidia could face similar fines for years Beyond 2018 especially since cryptocurrencies had a big boom during the pandemic but what is clear is that Nvidia cares about their gpus making it into the hands of Gamers who they see as one of their most core markets in early 2021 and video tried to fix this gaming versus mining problem with software and Hardware lhr stands for light hash rate and it's a piece of software built into their RTX 30 line and it limits the card's hash rate making it unattractive for ethereum miners they also released a line of chips called cmps or cryptocurrency mining processors which strip out the gaming functions and are optimized for crypto mining making them smaller cooler and more efficient they limit the hash rates on their main gpus so that miners don't buy them and then they limit the gaming on their mining gpus to make it better for the actual task then they can track the sales of both to understand how much of their GPU demand is coming from gaming with their RTX graphics cards versus how much of that demand is coming from mining with their CMP cards so it sounds like Nvidia figured it out right well what actually happened was that nvidia's revenues from the CMP cards immediately started to tank in quarter 2 of 2021 CMP revenues came in at just 266 million dollars which is a lot lower than 400 million they expected in quarter three that number dropped to 105 million dollars and in quarter four of last year it dropped to just 24 million dollars that's because crypto miners figured out how to bypass the light hash rate restrictions on nvidia's RTX cards so that way they could keep mining with the latest gaming gpus which means Nvidia still has very little insight into how much crypto is affecting their overall demand which is a big problem because demand for mining crypto with nvidia's gpus is about to drop big time for a few key reasons first you can't really profitably mine Bitcoin using gpus you need to use Asics like I mentioned earlier because the hash rate of Asics are tens of thousands of times higher instead nvidia's gpus are primarily used to mine ethereum and just like bitcoin's price ethereum's price has collapsed by nearly 80 percent from its highs last year that makes it much harder to turn a profit mining ethereum the second big problem is even bigger the ethereum blockchain is about to undergo a massive overhaul as early as September of this year part of that overhaul will move ethereum from a proof of work protocol to proof of stake which is where users put up their existing stakes in ethereum as a way to verify transactions and mint new coins this is a huge change in how ethereum gets mined which means nvidia's gpus won't be the preferred solution any longer even if ethereum's price does go back up this causes an interesting third problem where ethereum miners begin to decommission their mining Rigs and sell their Nvidia gpus on the second-hand Market at a discount effectively cannibalizing Nvidia sales to Gamers here's a quick clip from cnbc's Market alert where an analyst for New Street research explains exactly how this will happen so you know that the cryptocurrency is entering another wind with like a very very steep reduction in cryptocurrency transactions and that means a lot of crypto mining rigs with a lot of gpus are being the commissions and miners are settings these gpus and in the second hand Market of the gaming market for gpus and so that means it pulls away a lot of consumer demand a lot of Gamers who want to buy a GPU sending this is very good deal on the second hand market and are being pulled away from from the first hand market and Distributors see that and so what they do is they stop ordering from Nvidia and because they see and demand disappearing and that's really crystallized in the last two three two three months very clearly we had a lot of indication of that like 20 about about 20 percent of the mining volumes have disappeared in the last two three months so that's really the main driver for that and of course you add to that the economic environment we know there is like a very broad-based consumer slowdown consumer demand slow down PC demand is down smartphone demand is down um the China demand has been very weak uh consumer demand has been very weak in in recent uh Moon so that's like a perfect storm for NVIDIA to to see almost half their revenues disappearing in one quarter it's not new it's exactly the Playbook of late 2018 and 2019 uh when Nvidia faced exactly the same situation A slowdown in crypto currency transactions and a Slowdown in uh in consumer argument so we should expect a couple quarters of pain for NVIDIA as their year-over-year numbers decline when compared to a time when ethereum was at all-time highs and everyone was getting stimulus checks while being stuck inside playing video games and video should start to recover as their core markets begin to demand more of their core products again gaming scientific Computing accelerators for artificial intelligence and so on as long as Nvidia keeps dominating the core markets that they actually try to serve that should mean healthy long-term growth without too many surprising spikes in demand or surprising drops in Supply that strong product Market fit and predictability is what makes this loss of crypto miners good for them in the long term but GPU demand could fall for a different reason altogether except this time it's a reason that Nvidia is well prepared for many companies like Microsoft Google and Amazon are standing up online streaming services for gaming Google has stadia Amazon has Luna Nvidia has GeForce now and so on these companies have their own gigantic server Farms with much beefier Graphics processors in them instead of needing to have a device that can do all this high performance processing users will just pay a monthly fee sign in and play games over the Internet that means that Gamers might not be hunting for gpus or gaming consoles at all in just a few short years Nvidia is already building the gpus CPUs and other high performance Computing components for data centers even for other multi-billion dollar companies for example meta platforms research supercluster or RSC is one of the largest customer installations of nvidia's Hardware connecting over 6000 GP used to do things like translate the voices of large groups of people each speaking a different language Amazon web services also uses nvidia's gpus for applications like machine learning virtual workstations high performance Computing and different Internet of Things Services Grace is nvidia's First Data Center CPU and it goes on sale in early 2023 according to Nvidia Grace can deliver 10 times the performance of today's fastest servers on the most complex Ai and a high performance Computing workloads and then this year they launched Hopper which is their data center GPU together Grace Hopper and v-switch and NV link make up the building blocks of a modular architecture that can scale with the needs of any data center nvidia's Data Center business has been growing at over 50 percent per year without cloud gaming being a major market so even though demand for gpus might be down over the next year or so I really see that as more of a short-term speed bump due to a lot of crazy factors coming together the lockdowns the stimulus checks the crypto bubble and so on likewise I'm excited to see how much of nvidia's short-term headwinds are offset by their growth in data centers which could be used to power everything from the brains behind self-driving cars to the metaverse 're now worth more than Intel so if you want a story full of lying stealing and corporate Espionage company that controls all of our chips even nvidia's this episode is for you
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