Category: Business

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Business Digital

Nvidia Q2 Results

Nvidia’s Q2, 2025 results were highly anticipated to gauge the ongoing impact of Generative AI. The company delivered robust financials, reporting $30 billion in revenue—a 15% sequential increase and a 122% year-over-year rise—with gross margins at approximately 75%. Net income for the quarter was $16 billion.

Some of the key business highlights were as follows:

  1. Data Center Growth
    1. Data Center revenue reached a record $26.3 billion, up 16% sequentially and 154% year-on-year.
    1. Cloud service providers (CSPs) represented roughly 45% of Data Center revenue, indicating strong demand from this sector.
    1. Inference drove more than 40% of Data Center revenue, highlighting the growing importance of AI inferencing for various applications.
  2. Blackwell Ramp-up:
    1. Blackwell production is scheduled to begin in Q4 2024 and continue into fiscal year 2026.
    1. NVIDIA expects to ship several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue in Q4 2024.
    1. Demand for Blackwell platforms is well above supply and is expected to continue into next year.
  3. Spectrum-X Networking:
    1. Spectrum-X Ethernet revenue doubled sequentially, driven by strong adoption from OEMs, ODMs, and CSPs.
    1. Spectrum-X is well on track to become a multibillion-dollar product line within a year.
    1. NVIDIA plans to launch new Spectrum-X products every year to support the growing demand for scaling compute clusters.
  4. Sovereign AI Opportunities:
    1. Sovereign AI revenue is expected to reach low double-digit billions this year.
    1. NVIDIA is working with countries around the world to build their AI infrastructure and develop their own AI models.
    1. This presents a significant growth opportunity for NVIDIA in the coming years.
  5. Enterprise AI Wave:
    1. The enterprise AI wave has started, with NVIDIA working with most of the Fortune 100 companies on AI initiatives.
    1. NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform is gaining momentum, with its run rate expected to approach $2 billion by the end of this year.
    1. This indicates a growing adoption of AI solutions in various industries and a potential for significant revenue growth for NVIDIA.

The Q2 results of Nvidia indicate that Generative AI adoption is growing at a very fast pace and will have significant impacts to the business environment around the world.

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Business Career

Growing in a management role

An acquaintance reached out to get some career advice. She had worked in this organization for over 12 years. Over these years, she had been an individual contributor. Recently she had got an opportunity to take on an additional role in management. She was seeking advice on how to grow in management. My inputs were as follows:

  • Performance in the new role: As she is taking on a role in management for the first time, it is important for her to understand the expectations clearly. I advised her to have a discussion with her supervisor and agree to the metrics that she would be measured by. I also suggested that she seek feedback every three months.
  • Build a network internally and externally: Many of us do not consciously build our networks. This is especially true of an individual contributor, like a technical architect in IT or a faculty member in education. Such a person feels that performance should speak for his or her capabilities and that is sufficient to be recognized by the organization. However, performance in their current job, offers only one perspective. The individual may have other capabilities which may not come to the surface in the job they have. Hence it is important to meet different people in the organization and build a network. During that process, others in the organization will become aware of the individual’s capabilities. It is also important to build a network externally. One gains new insights from interacting with professionals externally. This will help them contribute more in their jobs which will in turn help in their career. Building an external network can take years. However, one can start the process by interacting with people from your college, family and then slowly extending it. I also advised her that when she is building these connections both internally and externally, she needs to contribute and not just receive. For example, send an interesting article to a colleague, connect two people in her network who may have a shared interest etc.
  • Build your personal brand: As we discussed, she realized, that her identify was closely linked to her current company. Many of us are in the same situation. We overestimate the value of our brand, without realizing that it gets power from the company we work for. One way to test this, is to ask yourself – will you be invited as a panelist in a conference if you are no longer in the current organization? Building a personal brand is easier said than done. Volunteering in an industry association, writing blogs & creating interest groups were some of the ideas we discussed.
  • Volunteer for cross-functional initiatives: It is good to get exposure to different aspects of a company’s functioning – marketing, customer experience, HR, finance & operations. One way to get this is to volunteer for corporate projects. Usually companies have cross-functional initiatives – ranging from quality projects, technology projects and annual strategic initiatives. I advised her to volunteer for such projects. Apart from getting wider perspective of the organization, this would also help her build internal networks.

While all the above is good advice, it will be important for her to execute on the above four areas. We did agree to meet again in a few months to take stock.

Categories
Business Digital

Data Privacy

Data privacy has been a hot topic of late.  There has been a recent surge in the usage of Signal a competitor to Whatsapp because of data privacy issues. There has been a widely reported talk by the Apple CEO, Tim Cook taking aim at companies like Facebook.  There have been hard questions asked in the US about the impact of social media on fake news and conspiracy theories.

A recent paper by Apple describes a scary scenario – a father & daughter go to the park and during that process, a lot of data gets collected & tracked. Some of the key points made in this paper include:

  • Personal data is being harvested by a large ecosystem – Apps, Websites, social media, third party brokers & ad-tech firms. In most cases, the data is harvested without the knowledge or consent of the people.
  • On an average, there are 6 trackers embedded in an App which collect and share data with data brokers as well as other Apps. So my data, which I have consented to be shared with one App is also going to other Apps and data brokers. One of the data brokers, according to this paper, collects data on 700 million people and they have created profiles with over 5000 characteristics
  • Many Apps, ask for more access to data, than what is required to provide the service and the user is not aware of this
  • There are alternatives to this widespread collection of data – Apple talks about a few principles:
    • Collect as little data as required for the service
    • Process the data on the device itself rather than storing it elsewhere
    • User should know and give consent to the data being harvested

Apple has announced two big changes. The first change is the introduction of an App Privacy section in the App Store – each App’s product page has to show a summary of developers’ privacy practices. However, it is unlikely that many users will view this before downloading the App.

The second change announced by Apple is more interesting and has caused the furor with Facebook, namely “App Tracking Transparency” which will be introduced soon. Once this is introduced, an App will be required to explicitly get the user’s permission before tracking their data across apps or websites. Without permission, the App will not be able to access the unique advertising identifier (IDFA) on the iPhone. Facebook has responded with plans to help users enable the tracking.

While the ecosystem players, notably Facebook, argue that the data collected, is being used for offering personalized ads to consumers thereby helping them – it is also true that the data is misused in many cases – fake news ads during elections & hate campaigns have been well documented.

In India, currently there are ongoing discussions in a joint parliamentary committee, of the draft Personal Data Protection bill which is likely to be debated in the Parliament soon. The final bill is likely to include compliance requirements for personal data, strengthening the data rights of an individual & introduction of a central data protection regulator.

But there is a more interesting discussion happening in India – on how sharing of data can bring benefits to the people. As Amitabh Kanth, the CEO of Niti Ayog put it – “In India, we not only need stronger data protection, but also data empowerment: everyday Indians need control over their own personal data to improve their lives.” For example, if there is data about GSTN transactions of a small businessperson, a bank can give the person working capital credit, even though the person doesn’t have a credit history. Similarly, personal loans can be given to individuals based on their digital payment history.  To enable this, a draft “Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture(DEPA)” document has been published for discussion. The key aspects of DEPA are as follows:

  • Ability for individuals to access their personal data generated across silos
  • Ability to digitally give consent for the use of the data – through the introduction of private “Consent Manager institutions”. These Consent Managers will also ensure protection of data rights.
  • Technology architecture – The Consent Artefact, a technology standard for programmable consent; Open APIs for data sharing; Industry information standards( financial industry has been developed)

These are interesting times indeed for data privacy. While in the US & Europe, there is debate on restricting data sharing as data is used primarily to sell things to the user, in India, there is a movement towards data empowerment – to benefit the user to access services. As has been said – in today’s digital world, data is the new oil – how it is handled, will determine the future of societies.

Categories
Business Digital General

Digital – Acceleration of Demand

I recently attended a talk by Nandan Nilekani, the Chairman of Infosys. Nandan is also well known for being the first Chairman of UIDAI, which developed Aadhar the unique id for every Indian.

In his address, Nandan talked about the importance of scale for a business – especially a business which is B2C.  For a business to scale, it is important to be in a market where the demand is huge & growing. According to Nandan, demand which typically grows organically, can sometimes get accelerated. Some of the ways in which demand for digital services in India has got accelerated are as follows:

  • Demand created by government policies
    • As has been well documented, demonetization in 2016 has caused a huge demand for digital payments in India. UPI which went live in April 2016, is now processing over 2 billion transactions per month.
    • Another example was the implementation in 2017 of GST in India, because of which over 11 million businesses had to go online – this has created huge demand for various products including accounting and tax software.
  • Demand created by technology
    • The launch of Jio, drove down the price of mobile data in India, thereby adding millions of active users of the Internet. India’s average cost per 1 GB of data is 9 cents compared to 8 dollars in the US. This in turn, has led to creation of huge demand for short-form videos.
  • Demand created by the Covid Pandemic
    • Hopefully we will never have a pandemic again. However, the pandemic has changed the consumer behavior in India for various online services:
      • Online learning – millions of children, parents & teachers have got comfortable with learning digitally
      • Telemedicine – while telemedicine pilots have been ongoing in India for several years, the pandemic forced patients and doctors to use teleconsultation as the primary mode for several months.
      • E-commerce – Consumers across age groups as well geography have experienced e-commerce during the pandemic.
    • Push to Pull – Before the pandemic, digital companies in India were ‘pushing’ people to experience online through discounts. The pandemic has changed that to a ‘pull’ thereby bringing down the cost of acquisition of a consumer. This will enable digital businesses to become profitable and sustainable sooner than before.

This is a great time for digital entrepreneurs in India. The demand has scaled dramatically and if entrepreneurs can execute well on the ground, we are likely to see several profitable digital enterprises.