Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business
Our Company
NVIDIA pioneered accelerated computing to help solve the most challenging computational problems. NVIDIA is now a full-stack computing infrastructure company with data-center-scale offerings that are reshaping industry.
Our full-stack includes the foundational CUDA programming model that runs on all NVIDIA GPUs, as well as hundreds of domain-specific software libraries, software development kits, or SDKs, and Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. This deep and broad software stack accelerates the performance and eases the deployment of NVIDIA accelerated computing for computationally intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence, or AI, model training and inference, data analytics, scientific computing, and 3D graphics, with vertical-specific optimizations to address industries ranging from healthcare and telecom to automotive and manufacturing.
Our data-center-scale offerings are comprised of compute and networking solutions that can scale to tens of thousands of GPU-accelerated servers interconnected to function as a single giant computer; this type of data center architecture and scale is needed for the development and deployment of modern AI applications.
The GPU was initially used to simulate human imagination, enabling the virtual worlds of video games and films. Today, it also simulates human intelligence, enabling a deeper understanding of the physical world. Its parallel processing capabilities, supported by thousands of computing cores, are essential for deep learning algorithms. This form of AI, in which software writes itself by learning from large amounts of data, can serve as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. GPU-powered AI solutions are being developed by thousands of enterprises to deliver services and products that would have been immensely difficult or even impossible with traditional coding. Examples include generative AI, which can create new content such as text, code, images, audio, video, and molecule structures, and recommendation systems, which can recommend highly relevant content such as products, services, media or ads using deep neural networks trained on vast datasets that capture the user preferences.
NVIDIA has a platform strategy, bringing together hardware, systems, software, algorithms, libraries, and services to create unique value for the markets we serve. While the computing requirements of these end markets are diverse, we address them with a unified underlying architecture leveraging our GPUs and networking and software stacks. The programmable nature of our architecture allows us to support several multi-billion-dollar end markets with the same underlying technology by using a variety of software stacks developed either internally or by third-party developers and partners. The large and growing number of developers and installed base across our platforms strengthens our ecosystem and increases the value of our platform to our customers.
Innovation is at our core. We have invested over $45.3 billion in research and development since our inception, yielding inventions that are essential to modern computing. Our invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market and redefined computer graphics. With our introduction of the CUDA programming model in 2006, we opened the parallel processing capabilities of our GPU to a broad range of compute-intensive applications, paving the way for the emergence of modern AI. In 2012, the AlexNet neural network, trained on NVIDIA GPUs, won the ImageNet computer image recognition competition, marking the “Big Bang” moment of AI. We introduced our first Tensor Core GPU in 2017, built from the ground-up for the new era of AI, and our first autonomous driving system-on-chips, or SoC, in 2018. Our acquisition of Mellanox in 2020 expanded our innovation canvas to include networking and led to the introduction of a new processor class – the data processing unit, or DPU. Over the past 5 years, we have built full software stacks that run on top of our GPUs and CUDA to bring AI to the world’s largest industries, including NVIDIA DRIVE stack for autonomous driving, Clara for healthcare, and Omniverse for industrial digitalization; and introduced the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software – essentially an operating system for enterprise AI applications. In 2023, we introduced our first data center CPU, Grace, built for giant-scale AI and high-performance computing. With a strong engineering culture, we drive fast, yet harmonized, product and technology innovations in all dimensions of computing including silicon, systems, networking, software and algorithms. More than half of our engineers work on software.
The world’s leading cloud service providers, or CSPs, and consumer internet companies use our data center-scale accelerated computing platforms to enable, accelerate or enrich the services they deliver to billions of end users, including AI solutions and assistants, search, recommendations, social networking, online shopping, live video, and translation.
Enterprises and startups across a broad range of industries use our accelerated computing platforms to build new generative AI-enabled products and services, or to dramatically accelerate and reduce the costs of their workloads and workflows. The enterprise software industry uses them for new AI assistants and chatbots; the transportation industry for autonomous driving; the healthcare industry for accelerated and computer-aided drug discovery; and the financial services industry for customer support and fraud detection.
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Researchers and developers use our computing solutions to accelerate a wide range of important applications, from simulating molecular dynamics to climate forecasting. With support for more than 3,500 applications, NVIDIA computing enables some of the most promising areas of discovery, from climate prediction to materials science and from wind tunnel simulation to genomics. Including GPUs and networking, NVIDIA powers over 75% of the supercomputers on the global TOP500 list, including 24 of the top 30 systems on the Green500 list.
Gamers choose NVIDIA GPUs to enjoy immersive, increasingly cinematic virtual worlds. In addition to serving the growing number of gamers, the market for PC GPUs is expanding because of the burgeoning population of live streamers, broadcasters, artists, and creators. With the advent of generative AI, we expect a broader set of PC users to choose NVIDIA GPUs for running generative AI applications locally on their PC, which is critical for privacy, latency, and cost-sensitive AI applications.
Professional artists, architects and designers use NVIDIA partner products accelerated with our GPUs and software platform for a range of creative and design use cases, such as creating visual effects in movies or designing buildings and products. In addition, generative AI is expanding the market for our workstation-class GPUs, as more enterprise customers develop and deploy AI applications with their data on-premises.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, NVIDIA was incorporated in California in April 1993 and reincorporated in Delaware in April 1998.
Our Businesses
We report our business results in two segments.
The Compute & Networking segment is comprised of our Data Center accelerated computing platforms and end-to-end networking platforms including Quantum for InfiniBand and Spectrum for Ethernet; our NVIDIA DRIVE automated-driving platform and automotive development agreements; Jetson robotics and other embedded platforms; NVIDIA AI Enterprise and other software; and DGX Cloud software and services.
The Graphics segment includes GeForce GPUs for gaming and PCs, the GeForce NOW game streaming service and related infrastructure; Quadro/NVIDIA RTX GPUs for enterprise workstation graphics; virtual GPU, or vGPU, software for cloud-based visual and virtual computing; automotive platforms for infotainment systems; and Omniverse Enterprise software for building and operating metaverse and 3D internet applications.
Our Markets
We specialize in markets where our computing platforms can provide tremendous acceleration for applications. These platforms incorporate processors, interconnects, software, algorithms, systems, and services to deliver unique value. Our platforms address four large markets where our expertise is critical: Data Center, Gaming, Professional Visualization, and Automotive.
Data Center
The NVIDIA Data Center platform is focused on accelerating the most compute-intensive workloads, such as AI, data analytics, graphics and scientific computing, delivering significantly better performance and power efficiency relative to conventional CPU-only approaches. It is deployed in cloud, hyperscale, on-premises and edge data centers. The platform consists of compute and networking offerings typically delivered to customers as systems, subsystems, or modules, along with software and services.
Our compute offerings include supercomputing platforms and servers, bringing together our energy efficient GPUs, DPUs, interconnects, and fully optimized AI and high-performance computing, or HPC, software stacks. In addition, they include NVIDIA AI Enterprise software; our DGX Cloud service; and a growing body of acceleration libraries, APIs, SDKs, and domain-specific application frameworks.
Our networking offerings include end-to-end platforms for InfiniBand and Ethernet, consisting of network adapters, cables, DPUs, and switch systems, as well as a full software stack. This has enabled us to architect data center-scale computing platforms that can interconnect thousands of compute nodes with high-performance networking. While historically the server was the unit of computing, as AI and HPC workloads have become extremely large spanning thousands of compute nodes, the data center has become the new unit of computing, with networking as an integral part.
Our end customers include the world’s leading public cloud and consumer internet companies, thousands of enterprises and startups, and public sector entities. We work with industry leaders to help build or transform their applications and data center infrastructure. Our direct customers include original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, original device manufacturers, or ODMs, system integrators and distributors which we partner with to help bring our products to market. We also have partnerships in automotive, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and retail among others, to accelerate the adoption of AI.
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At the foundation of the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform are our GPUs, which excel at parallel workloads such as the training and inferencing of neural networks. They are available in the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform and in industry standard servers from every major cloud provider and server maker. Beyond GPUs, our data center platform expanded to include DPUs in fiscal year 2022 and CPUs in fiscal year 2024. We can optimize across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to deliver data center-scale computing solutions.
While our approach starts with powerful chips, what makes it a full-stack computing platform is our large body of software, including the CUDA parallel programming model, the CUDA-X collection of acceleration libraries, APIs, SDKs, and domain-specific application frameworks.
In addition to software delivered to customers as an integral part of our data center computing platform, we offer paid licenses to NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a comprehensive suite of enterprise-grade AI software and NVIDIA vGPU software for graphics-rich virtual desktops and workstations.
In fiscal year 2024, we launched the NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI-training-as-a-service platform which includes cloud-based infrastructure and software for AI, customizable pretrained AI models, and access to NVIDIA experts. We have partnered with leading cloud service providers to host this service in their data centers.
Gaming
Gaming is the largest entertainment industry, with PC gaming as the predominant platform. Many factors propel its growth, including new high production value games and franchises, the continued rise of competitive gaming, or eSports, social connectivity and the increasing popularity of game streamers, modders, or gamers who remaster games, and creators.
Our gaming platforms leverage our GPUs and sophisticated software to enhance the gaming experience with smoother, higher quality graphics. We developed NVIDIA RTX to bring next generation graphics and AI to games. NVIDIA RTX features ray tracing technology for real-time, cinematic-quality rendering. Ray tracing, which has long been used for special effects in the movie industry, is a computationally intensive technique that simulates the physical behavior of light to achieve greater realism in computer-generated scenes. NVIDIA RTX also features deep learning super sampling, or NVIDIA DLSS, our AI technology that boosts frame rates while generating beautiful, sharp images for games. RTX GPUs will also accelerate a new generation of AI applications. With an installed base of over 100 million AI capable PCs, more than 500 RTX AI-enabled applications and games, and a robust suite of development tools, RTX is already the AI PC leader.
Our products for the gaming market include GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX GPUs for gaming desktop and laptop PCs, GeForce NOW cloud gaming for playing PC games on underpowered devices, as well as SoCs and development services for game consoles.
Professional Visualization
We serve the Professional Visualization market by working closely with independent software vendors, or ISVs, to optimize their offerings for NVIDIA GPUs. Our GPU computing platform enhances productivity and introduces new capabilities for critical workflows in many fields, such as design and manufacturing and digital content creation. Design and manufacturing encompass computer-aided design, architectural design, consumer-products manufacturing, medical instrumentation, and aerospace. Digital content creation includes professional video editing and post-production, special effects for films, and broadcast-television graphics.
The NVIDIA RTX platform makes it possible to render film-quality, photorealistic objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections and refractions using ray tracing in real-time. Many leading 3D design and content creation applications developed by our ecosystem partners now support RTX, allowing professionals to accelerate and transform their workflows with NVIDIA RTX GPUs and software.
We offer NVIDIA Omniverse as a development platform and operating system for building virtual world simulation applications, available as a software subscription for enterprise use and free for individual use. Industrial enterprises are adopting Omniverse’s 3D and simulation technologies to digitalize their complex physical assets, processes, and environments – building digital twins of factories, real time 3D product configurators, testing and validating autonomous robots and vehicles, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure on-premises and in the cloud.
Automotive
Automotive market is comprised of platform solutions for automated driving and in-vehicle cockpit computing. Leveraging our technology leadership in AI and building on our long-standing automotive relationships, we are delivering a complete end-to-end solution for the AV market under the DRIVE Hyperion brand. We have demonstrated multiple applications of AI within the car: AI can drive the car itself as a pilot in fully autonomous mode or it can also be a co-pilot, assisting the human driver while creating a safer driving experience.
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We are working with several hundred partners in the automotive ecosystem including automakers, truck makers, tier-one suppliers, sensor manufacturers, automotive research institutions, HD mapping companies, and startups to develop and deploy AI systems for self-driving vehicles. Our unified AI computing architecture starts with training deep neural networks using our Data Center computing solutions, and then running a full perception, fusion, planning, and control stack within the vehicle on the NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion platform. DRIVE Hyperion consists of the high-performance, energy efficient DRIVE AGX computing hardware, a reference sensor set that supports full self-driving capability as well as an open, modular DRIVE software platform for autonomous driving, mapping, and parking services, and intelligent in-vehicle experiences.
In addition, we offer a scalable data center-based simulation solution, NVIDIA DRIVE Sim, based on NVIDIA Omniverse software, for digital cockpit development, as well as for testing and validating a self-driving platform. Our unique end-to-end, software-defined approach is designed for continuous innovation and continuous development, enabling cars to receive over-the-air updates to add new features and capabilities throughout the life of a vehicle.
Business Strategies
NVIDIA’s key strategies that shape our overall business approach include:
Advancing the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform. Our accelerated computing platform can solve complex problems in significantly less time and with lower power consumption than alternative computational approaches. Indeed, it can help solve problems that were previously deemed unsolvable. We work to deliver continued performance leaps that outpace Moore’s Law by leveraging innovation across the architecture, chip design, system, interconnect, and software layers. This full-stack innovation approach allows us to deliver order-of-magnitude performance advantages relative to legacy approaches in our target markets, which include Data Center, Gaming, Professional Visualization, and Automotive. While the computing requirements of these end markets are diverse, we address them with a unified underlying architecture leveraging our GPUs, CUDA and networking technologies as the fundamental building blocks. The programmable nature of our architecture allows us to make leveraged investments in research and development: we can support several multi-billion-dollar end markets with shared underlying technology by using a variety of software stacks developed either internally or by third-party developers and partners. We utilize this platform approach in each of our target markets.
Extending our technology and platform leadership in AI. We provide a complete, end-to-end accelerated computing platform for AI, addressing both training and inferencing. This includes full-stack data center-scale compute and networking solutions across processing units, interconnects, systems, and software. Our compute solutions include all three major processing units in AI servers – GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs. GPUs are uniquely suited to AI, and we will continue to add AI-specific features to our GPU architecture to further extend our leadership position. In addition, we offer DGX Cloud, an AI-training-as-a-service platform, and NeMo – a complete solution for building enterprise-ready Large Language Models, or LLMs, using open source and proprietary LLMs created by NVIDIA and third parties. Our AI technology leadership is reinforced by our large and expanding ecosystem in a virtuous cycle. Our computing platforms are available from virtually every major server maker and CSP, as well as on our own AI supercomputers. There are over 4.7 million developers worldwide using CUDA and our other software tools to help deploy our technology in our target markets. We evangelize AI through partnerships with hundreds of universities and thousands of startups through our Inception program. Additionally, our Deep Learning Institute provides instruction on the latest techniques on how to design, train, and deploy neural networks in applications using our accelerated computing platform.
Extending our technology and platform leadership in computer graphics. We believe that computer graphics infused with AI is fundamental to the continued expansion and evolution of computing. We apply our research and development resources to enhance the user experience for consumer entertainment and professional visualization applications and create new virtual world and simulation capabilities. Our technologies are instrumental in driving the gaming, design, and creative industries forward, as developers leverage our libraries and algorithms to deliver an optimized experience on our GeForce and NVIDIA RTX platforms. Our computer graphics platforms leverage AI end-to-end, from the developer tools and cloud services to the Tensor Cores included in all RTX-class GPUs. For example, NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE, is a suite of technologies that help developers bring digital avatars to life with generative AI, running in the cloud or locally on the PC. GeForce Experience enhances each gamer’s experience by optimizing their PC’s settings, as well as enabling the recording and sharing of gameplay. Our Studio drivers enhance and accelerate a number of popular creative applications. Omniverse is real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulation software that empowers artists, designers, and creators to connect and collaborate in leading design applications. We also enable interactive graphics applications - such as games, movie and photo editing and design software - to be accessed by almost any device, almost anywhere, through our cloud platforms such as vGPU for enterprise and GeForce NOW for gaming.
Advancing the leading autonomous vehicle platform. We believe the advent of autonomous vehicles, or AV, and electric vehicles, or EV, is revolutionizing the transportation industry. The algorithms required for autonomous driving - such as perception, localization, and planning - are too complex for legacy hand-coded approaches and will use multiple neural networks instead. In addition, EV makers are looking for next-generation centralized car computers that integrate a wide range of intelligent functions into a single AI compute platform. Therefore, we provide an AI-based hardware and software solution, designed and implemented from the ground up based on automotive safety standards, for the AV and EV market under the DRIVE brand, which we are bringing to market through our partnerships with automotive OEMs,
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tier-1 suppliers, and start-ups. Our AV solution also includes the GPU-based hardware required to train the neural networks before their in-vehicle deployment, as well as to re-simulate their operation prior to any over-the-air software updates. We believe our comprehensive, top-to-bottom and end-to-end approach will enable the transportation industry to solve the complex problems arising from the shift to autonomous driving.
Leveraging our intellectual property, or IP. We believe our IP is a valuable asset that can be accessed by our customers and partners through license and development agreements when they desire to build such capabilities directly into their own products or have us do so through a custom development. Such license and development arrangements can further enhance the reach of our technology.
Sales and Marketing
Our worldwide sales and marketing strategy is key to achieving our objective of providing markets with our high-performance and efficient computing platforms and software. Our sales and marketing teams, located across our global markets, work closely with end customers and various industry ecosystems through our partner network. Our partner network incorporates global, regional and specialized CSPs, OEMs, ODMs, system integrators, independent software vendors, or ISVs, add-in board manufacturers, or AIBs, distributors, automotive manufacturers and tier-1 automotive suppliers, and other ecosystem participants.
Members of our sales team have technical expertise and product and industry knowledge. We also employ a team of application engineers and solution architects to provide pre-sales assistance to our partner network in designing, testing, and qualifying system designs that incorporate our platforms. For example, our solution architects work with CSPs to provide pre-sales assistance to optimize their hardware and software infrastructure for generative AI and LLM training and deployment. They also work with foundation model and enterprise software developers to optimize the training and fine-tuning of their models and services, and with enterprise end-users, often in collaboration with their global system integrator of choice, to fine-tune models and build AI applications. We believe that the depth and quality of our design support are key to improving our partner network’s time-to-market, maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction, and fostering relationships that encourage our end customers and partner network to use the next generation of our products within each platform.
To encourage the development of applications optimized for our platforms and software, we seek to establish and maintain strong relationships in the software development community. Engineering and marketing personnel engage with key software developers to promote and discuss our platforms, as well as to ascertain individual product requirements and solve technical problems. Our developer program supports the development of AI frameworks, SDKs, and APIs for software applications and game titles that are optimized for our platforms. Our Deep Learning Institute provides in-person and online training for developers in industries and organizations around the world to build AI and accelerated computing applications that leverage our platforms.
Seasonality
Our computing platforms serve a diverse set of markets such as data centers, gaming, professional visualization, and automotive. Our desktop gaming products typically see stronger revenue in the second half of our fiscal year. Historical seasonality trends may not repeat.
Manufacturing
We utilize a fabless and contracting manufacturing strategy, whereby we employ and partner with key suppliers for all phases of the manufacturing process, including wafer fabrication, assembly, testing, and packaging. We use the expertise of industry-leading suppliers that are certified by the International Organization for Standardization in such areas as fabrication, assembly, quality control and assurance, reliability, and testing. Additionally, we can avoid many of the significant costs and risks associated with owning and operating manufacturing operations. While we may directly procure certain raw materials used in the production of our products, such as memory, substrates, and a variety of components, our suppliers are responsible for procurement of most raw materials used in the production of our products. As a result, we can focus our resources on product design, quality assurance, marketing, and customer support. In periods of growth, we may place non-cancellable inventory orders for certain product components in advance of our historical lead times, pay premiums, or provide deposits to secure future supply and capacity and may need to continue to do so.
We have expanded our supplier relationships to build redundancy and resilience in our operations to provide long-term manufacturing capacity aligned with growing customer demand. Our supply chain is concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region. We utilize foundries, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited, or TSMC, and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., or Samsung, to produce our semiconductor wafers. We purchase memory from Micron Technology, Inc., SK Hynix Inc., and Samsung. We utilize CoWoS technology for semiconductor packaging. We engage with independent subcontractors and contract manufacturers such as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., Wistron Corporation, and Fabrinet to perform assembly, testing and packaging of our final products.
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Competition
The market for our products is intensely competitive and is characterized by rapid technological change and evolving industry standards. We believe that the principal competitive factors in this market are performance, breadth of product offerings, access to customers and partners and distribution channels, software support, conformity to industry standard APIs, manufacturing capabilities, processor pricing, and total system costs. We believe that our ability to remain competitive will depend on how well we are able to anticipate the features and functions that customers and partners will demand and whether we are able to deliver consistent volumes of our products at acceptable levels of quality and at competitive prices. We expect competition to increase from both existing competitors and new market entrants with products that may be lower priced than ours or may provide better performance or additional features not provided by our products. In addition, it is possible that new competitors or alliances among competitors could emerge and acquire significant market share.
A significant source of competition comes from companies that provide or intend to provide GPUs, CPUs, DPUs, embedded SoCs, and other accelerated, AI computing processor products, and providers of semiconductor-based high-performance interconnect products based on InfiniBand, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and proprietary technologies. Some of our competitors may have greater marketing, financial, distribution and manufacturing resources than we do and may be more able to adapt to customers or technological changes. We expect an increasingly competitive environment in the future.
Our current competitors include:
• suppliers and licensors of hardware and software for discrete and integrated GPUs, custom chips and other accelerated computing solutions, including solutions offered for AI, such as Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., or AMD, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., or Huawei, and Intel Corporation, or Intel;
• large cloud services companies with internal teams designing hardware and software that incorporate accelerated or AI computing functionality as part of their internal solutions or platforms, such as Alibaba Group, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, Inc., or Amazon, Baidu, Inc., Huawei, and Microsoft Corporation, or Microsoft;
• suppliers of Arm-based CPUs and companies that incorporate hardware and software for CPUs as part of their internal solutions or platforms, such as Amazon, Huawei, and Microsoft;
• suppliers of hardware and software for SoC products that are used in servers or embedded into automobiles, autonomous machines, and gaming devices, such as Ambarella, Inc., AMD, Broadcom Inc., or Broadcom, Intel, Qualcomm Incorporated, Renesas Electronics Corporation, and Samsung, or companies with internal teams designing SoC products for their own products and services, such as Tesla, Inc.; and
• networking products consisting of switches, network adapters (including DPUs), and cable solutions (including optical modules) include such as AMD, Arista Networks, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, Huawei, Intel, Lumentum Holdings, and Marvell Technology Group as well as internal teams of system vendors and large cloud services companies.
Patents and Proprietary Rights
We rely primarily on a combination of patents, trademarks, trade secrets, employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements, and licensing arrangements to protect our IP in the United States and internationally. Our currently issued patents have expiration dates from February 2024 to August 2043. We have numerous patents issued, allowed, and pending in the United States and in foreign jurisdictions. Our patents and pending patent applications primarily relate to our products and the technology used in connection with our products. We also rely on international treaties, organizations, and foreign laws to protect our IP. The laws of certain foreign countries in which our products are or may be manufactured or sold, including various countries in Asia, may not protect our products or IP rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. This decreased protection makes the possibility of piracy of our technology and products more likely. We continuously assess whether and where to seek formal protection for innovations and technologies based on such factors as:
• the location in which our products are manufactured;
• our strategic technology or product directions in different countries;
• the degree to which IP laws exist and are meaningfully enforced in different jurisdictions; and
• the commercial significance of our operations and our competitors' operations in particular countries and regions.
We have licensed technology from third parties and expect to continue entering such license agreements.
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Government Regulations
Our worldwide business activities are subject to various laws, rules, and regulations of the United States as well as of foreign governments.
During the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, the U.S. government, or the USG, announced licensing requirements that, with certain exceptions, impact exports to China (including Hong Kong and Macau) and Russia of our A100 and H100 integrated circuits, DGX or any other systems or boards which incorporate A100 or H100 integrated circuits.
In July 2023, the USG informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East.
In October 2023, the USG announced new and updated licensing requirements that became effective in our fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 for exports to China and Country Groups D1, D4, and D5 (including but not limited to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, but excluding Israel) of our products exceeding certain performance thresholds, including A100, A800, H100, H800, L4, L40, L40S and RTX 4090. The licensing requirements also apply to the export of products exceeding certain performance thresholds to a party headquartered in, or with an ultimate parent headquartered in, Country Group D5, including China. On October 23, 2023, the USG informed us the licensing requirements were effective immediately for shipments of our A100, A800, H100, H800, and L40S products.
Our competitive position has been harmed, and our competitive position and future results may be further harmed in the long term, if there are further changes in the USG’s export controls. Given the increasing strategic importance of AI and rising geopolitical tensions, the USG has changed and may again change the export control rules at any time and further subject a wider range of our products to export restrictions and licensing requirements, negatively impacting our business and financial results. In the event of such change, we may be unable to sell our inventory of such products and may be unable to develop replacement products not subject to the licensing requirements, effectively excluding us from all or part of the China market, as well as other impacted markets, including the Middle East.
While we work to enhance the resiliency and redundancy of our supply chain, which is currently concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region, new and existing export controls or changes to existing export controls could limit alternative manufacturing locations and negatively impact our business. Refer to “Item 1A. Risk Factors – Risks Related to Regulatory, Legal, Our Stock and Other Matters” for a discussion of this potential impact.
Compliance with laws, rules, and regulations has not otherwise had a material effect upon our capital expenditures, results of operations, or competitive position and we do not currently anticipate material capital expenditures for environmental control facilities. Compliance with existing or future governmental regulations, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to IP ownership and infringement, taxes, import and export requirements and tariffs, anti-corruption, business acquisitions, foreign exchange controls and cash repatriation restrictions, data privacy requirements, competition and antitrust, advertising, employment, product regulations, cybersecurity, environmental, health and safety requirements, the responsible use of AI, climate change, cryptocurrency, and consumer laws, could increase our costs, impact our competitive position, and otherwise may have a material adverse impact on our business, financial condition and results of operations in subsequent periods. Refer to “Item 1A. Risk Factors” for a discussion of these potential impacts.
Sustainability and Governance
NVIDIA invents computing technologies that improve lives and address global challenges. Our goal is to integrate sound environmental, social, and corporate governance principles and practices into every aspect of the Company. The Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of our Board of Directors is responsible for reviewing and discussing with management our practices related to sustainability and corporate governance. We assess our programs annually in consideration of stakeholder expectations, market trends, and business risks and opportunities. These issues are important for our continued business success and reflect the topics of highest concern to NVIDIA and our stakeholders.
The following section and the Human Capital Management Section below provide an overview of our principles and practices. More information can be found on our website and in our annual Sustainability Report. Information contained on our website or in our annual Sustainability Report is not incorporated by reference into this or any other report we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. Refer to “Item 1A. Risk Factors” for a discussion of risks and uncertainties we face related to sustainability.
Climate Change
In the area of environmental sustainability, we address our climate impacts across our product lifecycle and assess risks, including current and emerging regulations and market impacts.
In May 2023, we published metrics related to our environmental impact for fiscal year 2023. Fiscal year 2024 metrics are expected to be published in the first half of fiscal year 2025. There has been no material impact to our capital expenditures, results of operations or competitive position associated with global environmental sustainability regulations, compliance, or costs from sourcing renewable energy. By the end of fiscal year 2025, our goal is to purchase
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or generate enough renewable energy to match 100% of our global electricity usage for our offices and data centers. In fiscal year 2023, we increased the percentage of our total electricity use matched by renewable energy purchases to 44%. By fiscal year 2026, we aim to engage manufacturing suppliers comprising at least 67% of NVIDIA’s scope 3 category 1 GHG emissions with goal of effecting supplier adoption of science-based targets.
Whether it is creation of technology to power next-generation laptops or designs to support high-performance supercomputers, improving energy efficiency is important in our research, development, and design processes. GPU-accelerated computing is inherently more energy efficient than traditional computing for many workloads because it is optimized for throughput, performance per watt, and certain AI workloads. The energy efficiency of our products is evidenced by our continued strong presence on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient systems. We powered 24 of the top 30 most energy efficient systems, including the top supercomputer, on the Green500 list.
We plan to build Earth-2, a digital twin of the Earth on NVIDIA AI and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms. Earth-2 will enable scientists, companies, and policy makers to do ultra-high-resolution predictions of the impact of climate change and explore mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Human Capital Management
We believe that our employees are our greatest assets, and they play a key role in creating long-term value for our stakeholders. As of the end of fiscal year 2024, we had approximately 29,600 employees in 36 countries, 22,200 were engaged in research and development and 7,400 were engaged in sales, marketing, operations, and administrative positions. The Compensation Committee of our Board of Directors assists in the oversight of policies and strategies relating to human capital management.
To be competitive and execute our business strategy successfully, we must recruit, develop, and retain talented employees, including qualified executives, scientists, engineers, and technical and non-technical staff.
Recruitment
As the demand for global technical talent continues to be competitive, we have grown our technical workforce and have been successful in attracting top talent to NVIDIA. We have attracted talent globally through our strong employer brand and differentiated hiring strategies for college, professional, and leadership talent. Our workforce is 83% technical and 49% hold advanced degrees. Additionally, we have increased focus on diversity recruiting, resulting in an increase in global female hiring in each channel. Our own employees help to surface top talent, with over 40% of our new hires in fiscal year 2024 coming from employee referrals.
Development and Retention
To support employee development, we provide opportunities to learn on-the-job through training courses, targeted development programs, mentoring and peer coaching and ongoing feedback. We have a library of live and on-demand learning experiences that include workshops, panel discussions, and speaker forums. We create learning paths focused on our most common development needs and constantly upgrade our offerings to ensure that our employees are exposed to the most current content and technologies available. We offer tuition reimbursement programs to subsidize educational programs and advanced certifications. We implemented a career coaching service to provide one-on-one guidance to employees, and encourage internal job mobility. We have implemented specifically designed mentoring and development programs for women and employees from traditionally underrepresented groups to ensure widespread readiness for future advancement.
To evaluate employee sentiment and engagement, we use pulse surveys, a suggestion box, and an anonymous third-party platform. Pulse surveys help us gain insight into employee experience and provides employee-generated ideas so that we can take targeted action. The suggestion box is an always-on, interactive tool where employees share their thoughts about making our company a better place to work. The anonymous third-party platform is designed to protect the identity of the reporter and provide a mechanism for reporters to follow an investigation and receive responses.
We want NVIDIA to be a place where people can build their careers over their lifetime. Our employees tend to come and stay. In fiscal year 2024, our overall turnover rate was 2.7%.
Compensation, Benefits, and Well-Being
Our compensation program rewards performance and is structured to encourage employees to invest in the Company’s future. Employees receive equity, except where unavailable due to local regulations, that is tied to the value of our stock price and vests over time to retain employees while simultaneously aligning their interests with those of our shareholders.
We offer comprehensive benefits to support our employees’ and their families’ physical health, well-being, and financial health. Programs include 401(k) programs in the U.S., statutory and supplemental pension programs outside the U.S., our employee stock purchase program, flexible work hours, and time off policies to address mental health, stress, and time-management challenges. We evaluate our benefit offerings globally and aim to provide comparable support across the regions where we operate. We are committed to providing tailored benefits based on the needs of our Community Resource Groups and continuing our support for parents, both new birth parents and those who wish to become parents.
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Our support is enhanced during times of crisis, such as war or economic volatility, to take care of our existing team of world-class talent and their families.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging
We believe that diverse teams fuel innovation, and we are committed to creating an inclusive culture that supports all employees.
When recruiting for new talent or developing our current employees, we strive to build a diverse talent pipeline that includes those underrepresented in the technology field, including women, Black/African American, and Hispanic/Latino candidates.
To this end, we have been:
• Partnering with institutions and professional organizations serving historically underrepresented communities;
• Embedding dedicated recruiting teams to business areas to shepherd underrepresented candidates through the interview process and find internal opportunities;
• Supporting the development of women employees through programs aimed at building a pipeline of future leaders;
• Providing peer support and executive sponsors for our internal community resource groups;
• Providing training and education to managers and peers on fostering supportive environments and recruiting for diversity;
• Track equity and parity in retention, promotions, pay, and employee engagement scores; and
• Measuring year over year progress and providing leadership visibility on diversity efforts.
As of the end of fiscal year 2024, our global workforce was 79% male, 20% female, and 1% not declared, with 6% of our workforce in the United States composed of Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino employees.
Flexible Working Environment
We support a flexible work environment, understanding that many employees want the ability to work from home under certain conditions. This flexibility supports diverse hiring, retention, and employee engagement, which we believe makes NVIDIA a great place to work.
During fiscal year 2025, we will continue to have a flexible work environment and maintain our company wide 2-days off a quarter for employees to rest and recharge.
Information About Our Executive Officers
The following sets forth certain information regarding our executive officers, their ages, and positions as of February 16, 2024:
Name Age Position
Jen-Hsun Huang 60 President and Chief Executive Officer
Colette M. Kress 56 Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Ajay K. Puri 69 Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations
Debora Shoquist 69 Executive Vice President, Operations
Timothy S. Teter 57 Executive Vice President and General Counsel
Jen-Hsun Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served as our President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors since our inception. From 1985 to 1993, Mr. Huang was employed at LSI Logic Corporation, a computer chip manufacturer, where he held a variety of positions including as Director of Coreware, the business unit responsible for LSI's SOC. From 1983 to 1985, Mr. Huang was a microprocessor designer for AMD, a semiconductor company. Mr. Huang holds a B.S.E.E. degree from Oregon State University and an M.S.E.E. degree from Stanford University.
Colette M. Kress joined NVIDIA in 2013 as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Prior to NVIDIA, Ms. Kress most recently served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of the Business Technology and Operations Finance organization at Cisco Systems, Inc., a networking equipment company, since 2010. At Cisco, Ms. Kress was responsible for financial strategy, planning, reporting and business development for all business segments, engineering and operations. From 1997 to 2010 Ms. Kress held a variety of positions at Microsoft, a software company, including, beginning in 2006, Chief Financial Officer of the Server and Tools division, where Ms. Kress was responsible for financial
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strategy, planning, reporting and business development for the division. Prior to joining Microsoft, Ms. Kress spent eight years at Texas Instruments Incorporated, a semiconductor company, where she held a variety of finance positions. Ms. Kress holds a B.S. degree in Finance from University of Arizona and an M.B.A. degree from Southern Methodist University.
Ajay K. Puri joined NVIDIA in 2005 as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and became Executive Vice President, Worldwide Field Operations in 2009. Prior to NVIDIA, he held positions in sales, marketing, and general management over a 22-year career at Sun Microsystems, Inc., a computing systems company. Mr. Puri previously held marketing, management consulting, and product development positions at Hewlett-Packard, an information technology company, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a management and technology consulting company, and Texas Instruments Incorporated. Mr. Puri holds a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Minnesota, an M.S.E.E. degree from the California Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School.
Debora Shoquist joined NVIDIA in 2007 as Senior Vice President of Operations and in 2009 became Executive Vice President of Operations. Prior to NVIDIA, Ms. Shoquist served from 2004 to 2007 as Executive Vice President of Operations at JDS Uniphase Corp., a provider of communications test and measurement solutions and optical products for the telecommunications industry. She served from 2002 to 2004 as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Electro-Optics business at Coherent, Inc., a manufacturer of commercial and scientific laser equipment. Previously, she worked at Quantum Corp., a data protection company, as President of the Personal Computer Hard Disk Drive Division, and at Hewlett-Packard. Ms. Shoquist holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Kansas State University and a B.S. degree in Biology from Santa Clara University.
Timothy S. Teter joined NVIDIA in 2017 as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary and became Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary in February 2018. Prior to NVIDIA, Mr. Teter spent more than two decades at the law firm of Cooley LLP, where he focused on litigating patent and technology related matters. Prior to attending law school, he worked as an engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, an aerospace company. Mr. Teter holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Davis and a J.D. degree from Stanford Law School.
Available Information
Our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K and, if applicable, amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are available free of charge on or through our website, http://www.nvidia.com , as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. The SEC’s website, http://www.sec.gov , contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. Our web site and the information on it or connected to it are not a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.