A short article specified that CEO Huang had recently sold $40 million worth of shares. Perhaps he did. However, on the insider roster on Yahoo, his last sale was at $166 for around $3 million. He has automatically been selling, periodically, all the way up, with “small” amounts such as that.
I did not see this great insider selling by Mr. Huang that a short article focused on as an aspect to aggravate the recently issues. Perhaps someone else has found it. It would need to be a large insider sale within that last 3 months, subsequent to the previous earnings call just prior to the one a few days ago.
I still think it seems difficult to believe (albeit, not impossible) that a $700 million miss ($29 million - relatively small, and happens from time to time) was in the data center, but the rest (and actually more as there was upside to other areas, was all in gaming.
True to form Nvidia did very well in the high end again with the new Turing chips, and this should only improve as more games come out, and in particular in 2020 when the next upgrade comes out to fully cement the new architecture.
I do not necessarily think that AMD was taking more market share and commoditizing the market. More likely that NVIDIA GPUs (I have the 1070, which is the minimum necessary to operate my VR system, and it was something like $500 less than moving up to the 1080 in regard to a Dell gaming desktop). That was not an insignificant difference, and for me the 1070 was find. Crypto miners were probably selling a lot of Nvidia chips as well.
The issue with Turing, if I understand it correctly, is the chip is clearly more powerful, but if one incorporates ray tracing in the software the FPS does not increase all that much. Which of course makes sense as ray tracing takes an incredible amount of computation, and has never before been enabled on a gaming desktop before because it is so computationally difficult to do. Nvidia has done it with a combination of hardware and software, including AI to literally think ahead to take some of the computational requirements off the chip.
Thus, from a consumer perspective, you need to start seeing the new games to show the clear advantages of using ray tracing in order to pay the premium. And to date the new high end Turing chips have quickly sold out. But apparently not at great enough volume to offset the mess that otherwise exists and it is remarkable that Nvidia had so little insight in regard…practically malpractice.
But I will get off that issue. Just wanted to get into this insider selling thing as it besmirches Mr. Huang if he suddenly made a much larger insider sale in the $40 million plus range at just the time the business was, temporarily at least, falling off a cliff in gaming chips. I did not see any such sale in Yahoo! Does not mean it does not exist, but it is not there anyways.
Tinker