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NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 11, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is George, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the NVIDIA financial results conference call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Wednesday, February 11, 2015. I will now turn the call over to Ms. Colette Kress, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer with NVIDIA. Ms. Kress, you may begin your conference.

Colette M. Kress

Analyst · Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to NVIDIA's Conference Call for the Fourth Quarter of Fiscal 2015. With us on the call today from NVIDIA is Jen-Hsun Huang, President and Chief Executive Officer. I'd also like to introduce Arnab Chanda, who joined us last week, as the Head of Investor Relations. Arnab and Raj will closely work to support the investment community. I'd like to remind you, today's call is being webcast live on NVIDIA's Investor Relations website. It is also being recorded. You can hear a replay by telephone until February 18, 2015. The webcast will be available for replay up until the next quarter's conference call to discuss Q1 financial results. The content of today's call is NVIDIA's property. It cannot be reproduced or transcribed without our written prior consent. During the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. For a discussion of factors that could affect our future financial results and business, please refer to the disclosure in today's earnings release, our most recent Form 10-Q and the reports that we may file on Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All of our statements are based as of today, February 11, 2015, based on information currently available to us. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update any such statements. During this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. You may find a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in our CFO commentary, which is posted on our website. With that, let's start. We achieved record revenue for the fourth quarter and the full year, with impressive growth in each…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Ross Seymore. He's with Deutsche Bank.

Ross Seymore - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

[Audio Gap] the strong results and guidance. I guess the first question, Jen-Hsun, one for you on the Tegra side of the business. I know that can be inherently lumpy in how it operates, but can you talk about what you envision the biggest drivers in fiscal 2016 will be to get that business on a growth trajectory versus the year-over-year drop that it's currently running at?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Yes, Ross. First of all, thanks. Our strategy for Tegra is the focus on automotive, gaming. And wherever opportunities arise in OEMs, we surely will entertain it, but our fundamental focus is automotive and gaming. And you already heard Colette say that our automotive business nearly doubled year-over-year. Our gaming business is really strong, and we have some exciting things that we'd love to share with you at the -- in the near future. But that -- those are our 2 focuses for Tegra. And if you look at the opportunities that we're pursuing in the area of automotive, obviously, more and more cars are becoming computerized cars. And at CES, we announced a brand new platform called Drive. And Drive is basically a mobile super chip, a mobile super computer, with a ton of software on top. And it provides for 3 basic functionalities: The first is a very advanced digital cockpit. You know that we're incredibly good at computer graphics, and the things that we can do in the car with more and more displays showing up in the car is pretty wonderful. The second is a technology called surround vision. Beyond surround view, which is basically cameras connected around the car, surround vision not only allows you to see the images from the videos around the car, but also create a virtual environment around it and, using computer vision technology, keep your car alert of the surroundings. And the third is using a technology called deep learning that has been revolutionized recently and it's something that we're very much at the center of. Using deep learning, we can do voice processing, natural language processing and understanding of imagery so that the car can be more situational and environmentally aware. All of those technology -- technologies that I just described, we believe, will help pave the path to the self driving car. In the area of mobile, the gaming -- in the area of mobile gaming, the gaming market, as you know, is huge and is growing quite rapidly internationally. It's about a $70 billion business now. We know that mobile cloud is probably one of the most important disruptions in the history of computing, and yet there's really no computer gaming architecture that serves mobile cloud very well. And that's what SHIELD is all about, to create the platform that allows mobile cloud to bring gaming to a lot more people. And we think that by doing so, we'll be able to engage a much, much larger part of the overall gaming market than just PC gaming, okay? So our Tegra business model is about focusing on automotive and gaming.

Ross Seymore - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Great. I guess, as my follow-up, a bigger-picture question for the GPU side of the equation. You talked about the GeForce business being up 38% year-over-year, and GPUs, as an entirety, were up 13%. Is there any color you can provide just into the size of the buckets within your GPU segment so we can get the little more granular in how we model those very disparate growth rates, whether it's the 4 segments you break out in your segment definition and the CFO commentary? Or any other color you give, that would be helpful.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Our -- we serve 4 markets: gaming, automotive, enterprise graphics and high-performance computing and cloud computing. Those are the 4 major segments that we -- 4 major markets that we serve. GPUs serve gaming, enterprise graphics and cloud. Gaming, as we've said earlier, has grown, as you mentioned, 38% year-over-year. Our enterprise graphics business, the workstation business, is relatively flattish. However, our enterprise virtualization -- virtualized graphics platform called GRID about doubled year-over-year. And our Tesla business, which is our accelerated computing business about doubled year-over-year. The PC OEM business declined. The PC OEM business represents, I would say, low-teens maybe approximately part of our overall business. We've been talking about its decline for some time now. And this year, again, it declined. Obviously, the PC OEM business, representing umpteen percent of our overall GPU business, represents a substantially lower part of its profits because the gross margins at OEMs tend to be much lower. But nonetheless, it declined year-over-year, okay? So looking at those segments then, gaming grew, enterprise grew, cloud computing and high-performance computing grew, OEM business -- PC OEM business declined from a low umpteen percent level, okay?

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Shankar Subramanian - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch

This is Shankar on behalf of Vivek. Just a follow-up on that GPU breakdown. Could you give a color on what's the -- based on the guidance given for Q1, how do those individual segments kind of play out?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Sure. We guided seasonally down. And of course, as usual, we'll see how it turns out. But if you look at the position of each one of our platforms, our position in gaming is very strong. The gaming market globally is quite robust. We're still seeing gaming growth all around the world, and the production value of games is increasing all the time. And whenever the production value of a game increases, it requires more GPU performance. For the very first time in history, a game console has come out that uses essentially a PC architecture, and its performance is substantially higher than the average PC performance. And so as a result, we see a lot of adoption to our higher-end GPUs, and that's good. We also expect that the Tesla platform continues to be quite robust. We know now that GPUs are wonderful processors for massively parallel applications like deep learning. Deep learning could be used for voice recognition, natural language processing, image recognition, video tagging, all kinds of interesting applications that are made possible because of cloud computing and because there are so many sensors and images and voice being uploaded into the cloud. That's one of the drivers for Tesla, and the Tesla business has doubled year-over-year from a fairly large base now. My expectation is that this coming year, Tesla will remain on that trajectory, and I hope that Tesla will grow very nicely this coming year. GRID, another part of our GPU business, is all about enterprise virtualization. Because of GRID, we're now able -- companies are able to now virtualize beyond the data center all the way to the end-user computing device. For the very first time, it is now possible to virtualize graphics-intensive applications and make it possible for people to enjoy their applications wherever they are. So now you can be virtualized, it can be more secure, you can be more mobile, enjoy graphics on any device. That platform is growing nicely. A year ago, we had about 400 trials. Today, we have well over 1,000. And recently, the most -- the largest enterprise virtualization company in the world, VMware, has integrated GRID into vSphere, and it has been -- it has gone to production, and so we're seeing quite a bit of momentum from that production release. So these platforms are all growing nicely, and I expect this year to help drive our growth.

Shankar Subramanian - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Great. So I just have a follow-up on the autos business. I know you have -- you talked about different products and features that you have been working on, and those seem to be kind of the -- maybe a high-end side of auto. But can you talk about the products that you have for the mid and low end because it looks like that might be the area where the scale is. And also talk about how you are -- you plan to increase the gross margin for auto systems [ph]. Because it looks like it's in the low 30s if I just back out all the numbers based on your reported numbers.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Vivek Arya with Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Well, the answer to the second question I know better than the answer to the first, so I'll just answer that one first. The way to add -- the way to increase our gross margins is to continue to innovate and increase the amount of value-added that we bring. And if you recall a long time ago, a long time ago meaning about 10 years ago, NVIDIA's gross margins was about 30-some-odd percent. And over time, we made the platform more and more software-rich. Today, our gross margins are surely much, much higher than 35%. And so my expectations is to do the same on the NVIDIA Drive platform. It's intensely software-rich. I think somebody said that today, a car is about 10% software, but soon, the car will be about 80% software, and I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, in the future, with electric cars, you have obviously still very sophisticated drivetrain and such, but the car is going to be largely a computer with software. And that's where we can add an enormous amount of value, and that's what Drive is all about. Adding value through a very powerful processor, of course, but most of the capabilities I described from the digital cockpit to surround vision, to deep learning is all about software. It's all the software that runs on top of TX1. So that's #1. On your question about high-end versus midrange, I believe that more and more of the car's value will be delivered through software. And if you have to deliver it through software, then the processor underneath it is obviously more and more important. And my expectation is that great computing platforms will extend well into midrange into the low-end part of the marketplace. And that's just -- that's a belief. And just as I believed a long time ago, that the car is going to be one of our most sophisticated computers, which is obviously, at this point, coming true, my sense is that it's going to continue to go down that path, and we're going to see a lot more computation capability inside the car. To the point where I actually believe that every car will have a good processor, the high-end cars will have many good processors.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity.

Matthew D. Ramsay - Canaccord Genuity, Research Division

Analyst · Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity

I think the first one, Jen-Hsun, you made some interesting comments earlier about the need for, I guess, a fairly virtualized mobile gaming experience. I assume you're meaning across desktop tablets, smartphone, cloud, et cetera. One of the things that strikes me is, obviously, there's the suit going on between yourselves and Qualcomm, Samsung, et cetera. And your market share within the mobile graphics business when you think about smartphones is fairly small from a hardware perspective. So do you see that changing dramatically going forward? And if not, do you see the gaming mobile device market bifurcating from like the traditional smartphone market going forward?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity

Yes, Matt, thanks a lot for that question. First of all, mobile is much more than phones. Mobile is a fundamentally new way of designing computers, and I believe that mobile will impact almost every segment of computing as we know it. It'll impact refrigerators. That's not a phone. It'll impact drones. That's not a phone. It'll impact earrings. That's not a phone. It'll impact watches. That's not a phone. It'll impact game consoles that is not a phone. It'll impact cars, and that's not a phone. I think mobile is going to be important in all kinds of computing devices. When I say mobile, that's what I mean. I don't mean mobile as in the mobile phone. Mobile technology is really important. I also believe that mobile cloud in combination is one of the most powerful computing forces that the computer industry has ever known. Because of mobile cloud, we've been able to extend the capabilities and the benefits of computing to billions of people, whereas in the PC area, we were able to benefit hundreds of millions of people. And yet no one has yet created a game platform around mobile cloud, the technology of mobile cloud, the power of mobile cloud, the architecture of mobile cloud, so that we can extend gaming not to tens of millions of game console users, but billions of users. I think that that's the great opportunity. And I don't have anything to announce today, but that's what we're trying to endeavor. So I appreciate you asking that question. I think it's going to be a really big opportunity for us.

Matthew D. Ramsay - Canaccord Genuity, Research Division

Analyst · Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity

As a follow-up, this one is for Colette. Obviously, you guys have done a great job in returning cash to shareholders and announcing new plans for the next fiscal year. Maybe as the last fiscal year ends, maybe you could update us on your onshore and offshore cash balances, if you could and any perspectives on the difference in cash flow onshore and offshore.

Colette M. Kress

Analyst · Matt Ramsay. He's with Canaccord Genuity

Thanks, Matt, for the question. Again, we are looking at a cash balance lower than where we ended at fiscal year '14, due to our $1 billion return through shareholders, but also the increase in cash flow. Nothing has materially changed in terms of our cash flow from international and our cash flow in the U.S. So again, the majority of our cash flow tends to arrive from international overall operations. We have about the same mix of overall U.S. cash versus international cash, a little lower than where we ended at the end of fiscal year '14. But we feel very confident with our overall capital return program for fiscal year 16 and the overall cash flow prospects, so I think we're well aligned there.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo.

David M. Wong - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

Can you give us some idea what percentage of Tegra is now automotive? And just a clarification, when you say that automotive infotainment more than doubled year-over-year, do you mean all automotive? Is there some other segment than infotainment or -- yes.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

Most of our automotive today is infotainment. Some of -- more people are starting to do what Audi had done with their really amazing virtual cockpit, where infotainment and digital clusters merged into one. And digital clusters is much harder than infotainment. And so with Tegra, with our automotive platform, we're able to easily merge the 2. And so you'll see some more examples of that in the future. But initially, it's a largely infotainment, some amount of digital clusters, if that's your question. And between automotive and SHIELD, our gaming platform, that represents the vast majority of Tegra now.

David M. Wong - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

Okay, great. And you also mentioned Tesla more than doubled from an already substantial base. Can you give us some idea of the size of Tesla today?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

I'm sorry? Tesla?

Colette M. Kress

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

Tesla.

David M. Wong - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

Tesla, yes.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

Tesla is several hundred million dollars -- is multiple hundred dollars now.

David M. Wong - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

On a quarterly basis?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · David Wong. He's with Wells Fargo

On an annual basis. And it grew -- nearly doubled year-over-year so...

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Christopher Rolland. He's with FBR Capital Markets. Christopher Rolland - FBR Capital Markets & Co., Research Division: Can you guys talk a little bit about your eventual move to 20 nanometers? And it seems like you guys are staying on 28 for perhaps a bit longer than you have prior nodes. And if you are staying here for longer, is it safe to assume that you can get some gross margin uplift year-over-year?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Christopher Rolland

Well, let's see. We're always moving to the next node. And Tegra X1, the mobile super chip that we announced at CES, is 20 nanometer, and so we're always moving forward. But the equation is much more complicated than that, and the reason for that is because we have the ability because of the fact that we architect and innovate from architecture all the way to software, we have the ability to improve our performance and efficiency and features on all of those dimensions. We can improve at the architectural level using the same process. We can innovate at the design level using the same process and same architecture. We can innovate at the process level. We can innovate at the software level. We can innovate at the algorithm level. And because we control all of that, we have the ability to move the needle forward in multiple dimensions. And so if you look at Maxwell, Maxwell is an unbelievable energy-efficient processor. And because of the energy efficiency of Maxwell, not only did we make all of GeForce higher performance, lower power, quieter, we were also able to take that GPU just a few months later and put it into a Tegra X1, and the performance is really quite shocking. And so we could innovate on multiple levels as a company. That's one of the benefits. But overall, we're moving forward all the time in process technology. Christopher Rolland - FBR Capital Markets & Co., Research Division: Okay, great. And then also at CES, love the automated driving stuff, but I was a little confused on the way that you're positioning yourself in that market, particularly sort of you against or either with Mobileye. I mean, I talked to one person, they say you're going head-to-head. I talked to another person, they say you're partnering. And I talked to another person at the booth who said that you guys are really enabling third parties to go after Mobileye. So how do you think about yourself positioning yourself in that market? Are you really going after them there?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Christopher Rolland

Oh, wow. I appreciate that question. I think it's a great question, and the answer is actually really simple. I mean, we are in 2 different things. We make 2 different things, and so we're very complementary. Mobileye, think of it as a computer vision signal processor ISP, if you will. It's connected to the camera, and they do wonderful work in computer vision in that area. The Drive platform is a computing platform. Just as a phone has an ISP as well as the application processor, in this case, we're the application processor, if you will. This application processor has been designed to be incredible in the 3 areas that I talked about, digital cockpit, surround vision and deep learning-based computer vision. And so many of the customers -- in fact, most of the customers that I know, where there is ADAS work being done, we're both involved. And so we're connected to many Mobileye devices, and we're delighted by that. But even if you're able to detect images and objects, you still need to do something to process that information, and we can do it -- we could reconstruct the surround environment. We still have to drive infotainment in the digital cluster. And of course, we could apply higher-level deep learning algorithms to figure out what to do with the objects that you detect. And so I see ourselves very, very complementary. And of course, because we're a general-purpose processor and it's 1 teraflops of computing, we can do a lot of things for computer vision. And that's probably where people are questioning the overlap. But from where I see it, we're very complementary.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Blayne Curtis. He's with Barclays.

Blayne Curtis - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Blayne Curtis. He's with Barclays

Jen-Hsun, just want to follow up on in terms of the auto opportunity, just your dollar -- how is your dollar content progressing? You're talking about selling modules, multiple processors and then more importantly, monetizing the software. And then if you could talk about some of the timing here, I think the auto OEMs have become a little quicker. Where are you today in terms of the generation of products you're selling, Tegra 3 or K1? And when could you see some of these more advanced systems actually hitting revenue?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Blayne Curtis. He's with Barclays

Yes, I really appreciate the question, and you're exactly right. The dynamics are that more and more of the value of a car is going to have to go into its computing -- the heart and soul of its computing platform. And our expectations about our computer car and the software capabilities we can bring to bear over mechanical, electronic type of widgety things is going to grow substantially. Second, the fact of the matter is you can't spend 5 years designing a car anymore. Consumer electronics moves way too fast. People's expectations are set by what they have in their phones, and so you've got to move faster. And the most progressive car companies are moving at the speed of light now. They've taken their design cycle from 5 to 3, and I think I'm seeing them moving down to 2, potentially 1. And so this is going to be a brand new automotive industry. And the third thing that you mentioned is the content. Well, if you think about cars as a chip opportunity and it's an application processor opportunity like an infotainment like a smart phone, then, of course, it's in tens of dollars. But I actually see the car as a multi-thousand dollar computer opportunity. Some are one computer, some are many computers. And we're a computer company. We're a visual computing company. We are software-rich. All of the applications that I mentioned, the capabilities I mentioned are all software, we provide the entire BSP. We're one of the few companies in the automotive industry that can provide literally end-to-end solutions, and that's what Drive is about. Drive is a computer platform, software and all, and we provide capabilities across-the-board, okay? So I see the car, long term, as quite a large opportunity for us, not a chip opportunity because we're not a chip company anymore.

Blayne Curtis - Barclays Capital, Research Division

Analyst · Blayne Curtis. He's with Barclays

And just to reflect quickly on gross margin. I think you mentioned gaming as the tailwind for gross margin. Is that more a function of just Maxwell and pricing or you're actually seeing gaming not down as much seasonally? And then as you look out the rest of the year, how should we think of that tailwind?

Colette M. Kress

Analyst · Blayne Curtis. He's with Barclays

Yes, thanks for the question. So our gross margin guidance is just for Q1. We do see seasonal effects as we usually go from Q4 to Q1. We believe gaming is still a driver just due to the mix of the type that we're selling into the market, and we've also talked about accelerated computing and cloud also as a driver of our guidance in Q1.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Harlan Sur with JP Morgan. Harlan Sur - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Maxwell is driving a solid sum expansion into the notebook market. I think you guys started to see that in Q3, with that segment up 2x year-over-year. Customer gaming notebook platforms were pretty visible during the holiday season. So I apologize if I missed this, but how much did the notebook gaming business grow for you guys in Q4? And maybe, Jen-Hsun, if you can just help us quantify where the attach rates could go and how much this expands your GPU gaming opportunity.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Harlan Sur with JP Morgan

Yes, I really appreciate the question. Maxwell made it possible. So first of all, the background. Maxwell made it possible, for the very first time, the ability to put a high-end GPU in a laptop and deliver a desktop-quality experience. So you can now get a laptop with a GeForce in it and have -- and run AAA titles at 1080p and at quality levels and frame rates higher than the state-of-the-art game consoles. That's pretty amazing. You can now just have a nice and thin laptop, and it's better than a game console. It's better than a game console. And so people are quite excited about that. Maxwell made that possible. We see this business growing well over 100% per year at the moment simply because it's off of a small base. This has been an underserved part of the market for some time. We've really welcomed just about every company in the world -- laptop company in the world into this opportunity, from ASUS to MSI, GIGABYTE. Recently, even HP came into this. And I say even because, of course, HP is largely focused on enterprises, and yet this opportunity is so significant that their notebook business decided to jump into the GeForce platform. Of course, Dell; of course, Alienware; or course Razer. We're just seeing a lot of support from every notebook maker in the world because this is an unserved -- underserved market, if you will, and with the tech -- with the Maxwell energy efficiency, for the first time, we're able to deliver an experience that, quite frankly, is pretty amazing. And so where do I see the attach? I guess, I don't think about attach anymore, and the reason for that is because PC OEM business is not really our focus in the sense that it's already umpteen -- a low umpteen part of our business. The way we think about that business is, that's really a gaming business. And how big can it be really is a function of how many gamers are there in the world. And I think the numbers are actually quite substantial, are really quite substantial. So I see this as a growth opportunity for some time. Harlan Sur - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: And then, Colette, nice job on your part and on the team's part on the OpEx discipline in Q4 and here in Q1. How should we think about the OpEx trajectory for the remainder of the year?

Colette M. Kress

Analyst · Harlan Sur with JP Morgan

Yes, we really just are here to focus on our Q1 guidance and what we can see at this time. When we get further into the year, we'll talk about the full year. But again, we do just want to balance our Q1 with the investments that we need to make with, again, looking at the efficiencies across the org and what we can do. So I think that's a consistent theme. And you've seen us play that out in fiscal year '15, and our guidance for Q1 is about that same.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura.

Sanjay Chaurasia - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division

Analyst · Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura

Jen-Hsun, one question on your GRID GPUs. I -- my impression was that you were very excited about the upcoming VMware release, and it has G8, obviously. I was just wondering if you -- does it give you better visibility in terms of upcoming deployments? And do you see that all the challenges that remain for the customers that were trialing GRID, they're really to deploy that? Or you see there are some missing pieces still? I just wanted to get some color on that.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura

Well, with VMware's integration, we're now able to engage probably some 80% of the world's enterprises. Just about anybody who has virtualized their enterprise had done so with VMware's technology. And so I think that this is a really big deal. And if you look at our trials, we went from about 400 last year at this time to well over 1,000 this year this time. Our revenues doubled. My sense is that there's no reason for that pace to slow, and we'll see how it turns out. But I would think that my intuition would be kind of like yours, that, if anything, you've got to accelerate. But there's really -- the most important thing about enterprise virtualization all the way to the client is to have deep integration with VMware, and we've done that, and they've done a great job. They've been a great partner.

Sanjay Chaurasia - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., Research Division

Analyst · Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura

And as a follow-up, Jen-Hsun, you guys indicated some large project wins with cloud service provider on Tesla's side. Could you give us some color on what exactly is the use case? You did talk about deep learning and image processing. I just wanted to understand a little bit, if you could give us more color. And where exactly are you on that ramp? Is that kind of a lumpy deployment that you saw or is that something very early in the ramp and we could continue to see that grow?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura

Yes, a lot of these projects are quite confidential, but I'll highlight 2 that have been public. Baidu announced that they built a supercomputer based on Tesla for deep learning, and it's used for natural language processing, translations in real-time from language to language, image recognition. Another one that was public, I just saw yesterday -- and this is actually quite a monumental event. The event is, for the very first time, for the very first time in history, a computer is able to understand images better than humans. This is a milestone event in the development of neural nets, the development of computer vision, and it was announced by Microsoft yesterday. A human has -- the best human has the ability to detect and make errors on about 5.1% of the time or recognize 95% of the images that they are presented. For the very first time in history, a computer is now able to recognize over 95%, better than a human. That, I think, is really quite a record. We will remember this day for a long time and look back on it. And they also said that their deep neural nets were trained using NVIDIA GPUs. And so you could see -- these are couple of the examples, and they were public about it. In the coming event, there's a GTC coming up. It's on March 15?

Unknown Executive

Analyst · Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura

17.

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Sanjay Chaurasia with Nomura

17th, I'm sorry, March 17, our annual GPU Technology Conference. This year, we'll going to highlight deep learning and computer vision. I really, really encourage people who love computer technology to come and see some of the largest computer companies and most influential computer designers in the world talk about using GPUs in these areas. It's just a huge event, and this is going to be the largest GTC we've ever held. It's right here in San Jose, and this could be the Mecca for deep learning.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Rajvindra Gill with Needham. Rajvindra S. Gill - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: Could you just talk a little bit about your transition to a platform company? You definitely, over the last few years, have transformed from a component supplier to more of a platform-based business, where you're getting higher margins. I'm just wondering kind of where we are in that development cycle. And how do you look at the overall business model over the next 3 to 5 years for the company?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · a platform-based business, where you're getting higher margins. I'm just wondering kind of where we are in that development cycle. And how do you look at the overall business model over the next 3 to 5 years for the company

Yes, I really appreciate the question. First of all, if you look at our company 10 years ago, 10 years ago, we were 100% PC OEMs largely. Maybe it wasn't 100%, but it was close. And now we're less than, we're only umpteen percent, substantially less than 20%. And so the company has been -- has been transitioning to this new model with our own platforms, largely software, and they serve 4 vertical markets. These 4 vertical markets have a characteristic that really, really benefits from great visual computing technology. And those 4 vertical markets, as I've mentioned, is gaming, is automotive, is enterprise graphics and is high-performance computing and cloud computing. And our PC OEM business is continuing to decline because PCs have largely become good enough, and it's fragmented. Most people use their PCs for information access, for working, and some people use it for gaming. And so for those gaming markets, we serve those. But for most of the generic and mainstream PCs, we've largely been out of those for some time. And so if you look at our business, it's now really focused on serving these 4 markets with our market-specialty platforms, and so I really appreciate that. The gross margins are obviously higher because it's very software-rich. If you extracted out the PC OEM business and just looked at those 4 segments, our gaming business, I think somebody mentioned, was growing at over 30%. Our automotive business has doubled. Our Tesla cloud computing business has doubled, and enterprise computing, our GRID business, has doubled year-over-year. And so those value-added, highly differentiated platforms are really growing nicely, and it's more than making up for the decline of our PC OEM business, which, as a result, our margins also increase. And so now you're starting to see the dynamics of the business, and it basically works like that. Rajvindra S. Gill - Needham & Company, LLC, Research Division: So very good. And last question for me with respect to GRID. So I was wondering if you could maybe update us on the design engagements with GRID in 2014 relative to, say, 2013. And as you continue on this trajectory, can you talk a little bit about how the enterprises are beginning to realize the leverage that a cloud-based visual computing architecture enables? And when do you think -- because the installed base is very large, as you've mentioned. And do you think this year will be the inflection point or are we already past the inflection point and you think we're going to start to see more acceleration of this cloud-based digital system?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · a platform-based business, where you're getting higher margins. I'm just wondering kind of where we are in that development cycle. And how do you look at the overall business model over the next 3 to 5 years for the company

Yes. Well, there's -- let me break that question down into a couple of pieces. One, the number of OEM platforms that we were designed into, that we were designed into, was about 50 last year. It's almost 100 this year. About 50 this time last year, about 100 this time -- at this time. The number of trials we had last year was about 400. The number of trials we have here is about 1,000 plus. And the difference -- and I think the difference going forward for this coming year, when we stand here and look at this coming year backwards, I believe that what we're going to see is because of our now-completed integration with both VMware and Citrix and the fact that every single enterprise OEM has now adopted GRID and that GRID is making its way through just about every enterprise -- every company in the world as they get to be familiarized with them, I believe that this year could be a very important year for GRID. Now the second question that you asked is what are some of the things that people found are benefits of GRID, and I would say that there are several. The first one, the very first one is, of course, mobility. Mobility as in the sense that you can now access your PC applications from anywhere you happen to be, on any device you happen to be on. And so whatever device you have, all you have to do is have a browser and -- or an application, a receiver, if you will, a receiver application from VMware and Citrix, and you remote back into your PC. And every graphics application is perfectly compatible. The performance is wonderful, and it's where you left off, okay? So one is…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Chin with UBS.

Stephen Chin - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division

Analyst · Stephen Chin with UBS

Jen-Hsun, if I could ask -- first ask about the gaming business in terms of PCs. In fiscal Q4, can you talk a little bit more about geographically how demand was across the developed markets as well as the emerging markets?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Stephen Chin with UBS

Yes, Stephen. Our largest market is China. As you know -- as you probably are -- could guess, GeForce is the largest game platform in China, and the reason for that is because it's a market that historically hasn't had access to game consoles. It's still extremely important, given how extremely expensive consoles are. And of course, most of the titles are from the West, and most of the titles that people enjoy in China tends to be multiplayer. It tends to be role-playing games. It tends to be Internet-based games. And so though China still remains our largest market, the fastest-growing market is probably Southeast Asia. These developing countries -- developing markets, excuse me, developing markets, then they get to a certain point in their computer history and Internet history, all of a sudden, the gaming market booms. And in that area, Southeast Asia, we know now the economies have become sufficiently vibrant because of the outpouring of opportunities from China. Those local regional economies have now become quite large and quite vibrant, and we're seeing the same thing now as we saw 5 years ago in China. We're seeing the same developments in Southeast Asia. So I would say that Southeast Asia is still -- is probably the fourth largest region, but it's the fastest-growing region by far. And then, of course, the U.S. and Europe are both quite vibrant.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Gauna with JMP Securities.

Alex Gauna - JMP Securities LLC, Research Division

Analyst · Alex Gauna with JMP Securities

I was wondering, Jen-Hsun, if you could update us on what's going on in the licensing front. Perhaps comment on it if it's getting to the point where it might provide a tailwind to gross margins this year. Or if not this year, when?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · Alex Gauna with JMP Securities

Well, our licensing discussions are ongoing and quite rigorous. And the thing that is, of course, very important to note is that we are unquestionably the world leader in digital computing. And we have created so much modern computer graphics it's almost hard to make -- even make a list of it anymore, fundamentally from the invention of the GPU to modern general-purpose computing, GPUs like CUDA and others. The type of work that we're doing is obviously pioneering, and it's very important to many markets. We're open to licensing technology to companies who would like to exercise their own design and build their differentiated products, but protecting our IP is extremely important to our company. We're in discussions. Of course, the most public discussion is the one with Samsung and Qualcomm, and we're looking forward to some of the developments that will be happening in just a few more months. And so I look forward to reporting on the developments in that area in the next several quarters.

Operator

Operator

Our last question comes from the line of Ian Ing with MKM Partners.

Ian Ing - MKM Partners LLC, Research Division

Analyst · MKM Partners

Could you talk about your foundry strategy a little bit? I mean, TSMC, a good supplier, but not considered the best FinFET out there. Would you consider diversification being something you'd evaluate?

Jen-Hsun Huang

Analyst · MKM Partners

Well, first of all, TSMC is a fabulous supplier. And number two, their FinFET technology is excellent, and we've been evaluating it. And we -- of course, we do test chips, and our test chip technology is incredibly rigorous, and we take it very, very seriously. This has come from the years of learning that and working with advanced process nodes and fast process ramps. We take it incredibly seriously. So we're working with TSMC on FinFET now for a couple of years, and so we have quite a bit of confidence in their ability to deliver amazing FinFET transistors. I guess with respect to that, we always look to look at all foundries, and TSMC remains our most strategic, of course, and they're going to continue to be a very, very important partner for us for the foreseeable future.

Colette M. Kress

Analyst · MKM Partners

Okay, operator, I think this is the end of our call. And to all that joined us, I thank you, and we'll see you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line.