ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS
Other than the risk factors listed below, there have been no material changes from the risk factors previously described under Item 1A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 29, 2023.
Purchasing or owning NVIDIA common stock involves investment risks including, but not limited to, the risks described in Item 1A of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 29, 2023, and below. Additionally, any one of those risks could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations or reputation, which could cause our stock price to decline. Additional risks, trends and uncertainties not presently known to us or that we currently believe are immaterial may also harm our business, financial condition, results of operations or reputation.
Failure to meet the evolving needs of our industry and markets may adversely impact our financial results.
Our accelerated computing platforms experience rapid changes in technology, customer requirements, competitive products, and industry standards.
Our success depends on our ability to:
•timely identify industry changes, adapt our strategies, and develop new or enhance and maintain existing products and technologies that meet the evolving needs of these markets, including due to unexpected changes in industry standards or disruptive technological innovation that could render our products incompatible with products developed by other companies;
•develop or acquire new products and technologies through investments in research and development;
•launch new offerings with new business models including standalone software, cloud solutions, and software-, infrastructure-, or platform-as-a-service solutions;
•expand the ecosystem for our products and technologies;
•meet evolving and prevailing customer and industry safety, security, reliability expectations, and compliance standards;
•manage product and software lifecycles to maintain customer and end user satisfaction;
•develop, acquire, and maintain the internal and external infrastructure needed to scale our business, including our acquisitions integrations, customer support, e-commerce, IP licensing capabilities and cloud service capacity; and
•complete technical, financial, operational, compliance, sales and marketing investments for the above activities.
We have invested in research and development in markets where we have a limited operating history, which may not produce meaningful revenue for several years, if at all. If we fail to develop or monetize new products and technologies, or if they do not become widely adopted, our financial results could be adversely affected. Obtaining design wins may involve a lengthy process and depend on our ability to anticipate and provide features and functionality that customers will demand. They also do not guarantee revenue. Failure to obtain a design win may prevent us from obtaining future design wins in subsequent generations. We cannot ensure that the products and technologies we bring to market will provide value to our customers and partners. If we fail any of these key success criteria, our financial results may be harmed.
We offer enterprise customers NVIDIA AI cloud services directly and through our network of partners. Examples of these services include NVIDIA DGX Cloud, which includes cloud-based infrastructure and software for training and deploying AI models, and NVIDIA AI Foundations for customizable pretrained AI models. We have partnered with cloud service providers to host these services in their data centers, and we entered and may continue to enter into multi-year cloud service agreements to support these offerings and our research and development activities. The timing and availability of these cloud services has changed and may continue to change, impacting revenue, expenses and development timelines. NVIDIA AI cloud services may not be successful and will take time, resources and investment. We also offer or plan to offer standalone software solutions including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA DRIVE, and several other software solutions. These new business models or strategies may not be successful and we may fail to sell any meaningful standalone software or services. We may incur significant costs and may not achieve any significant revenue from these offerings.
Failure to estimate customer demand properly has led and could lead to mismatches between supply and demand.
We use third parties to manufacture and assemble our products, and we have had and may in the future have long manufacturing lead times. We are not provided guaranteed wafer, component and capacity supply, and our supply deliveries and production may be non-linear within a quarter or year. If our estimates of customer demand are ultimately inaccurate, as we have experienced from time to time, there could be a significant mismatch between supply and demand. This mismatch has resulted in both product shortages and excess inventory, has varied across our market platforms, and has significantly harmed our financial results.
We build finished products and maintain inventory in advance of anticipated demand. While we have in the past entered and may in the future enter into long-term supply and capacity commitments, we may not be able to secure sufficient commitments for capacity to address our business needs or our long-term demand expectations may change. Additionally, our ability to sell certain products has been and could be impeded if components from third parties that are necessary for the finished product are not available. In periods of shortages impacting the semiconductor industry and/or limited supply or capacity in our supply chain, the lead times on our orders may be extended. We have previously experienced extended lead times of more than 12 months. We have paid premiums and provided deposits to secure future supply and capacity, which have increased our product costs and may continue to do so. We may not have the ability to reduce our supply commitments at the same rate or at all if our revenue declines.
Many additional factors have caused and/or could in the future cause us to either underestimate or overestimate our customers’ future demand for our products, or otherwise cause a mismatch between supply and demand for our products and impact the timing and volume of our revenue, including:
•competing technologies and competitor product releases and announcements;
•changes in business and economic conditions resulting in decreased end demand;
•sudden or sustained government lockdowns or actions to control case spread of global or local health issues;
•rapidly changing technology or customer requirements;
•time to market;
•new product introductions and transitions resulting in less demand for existing products;
•new or unexpected end use cases;
•increase in demand for competitive products, including competitive actions;
•business decisions made by third parties;
•the demand for accelerated or AI-related cloud services, including our own software and AI cloud service offerings;
•changes that impact the ecosystem for the architectures underlying our products and technologies;
•the demand for our products relating to cryptocurrency mining; or
•government actions or changes in governmental policies, such as increased restrictions on gaming usage.
Our supply, which includes inventory on hand, purchase obligations and prepaid supply and capacity agreements, has grown significantly due to recent supply chain conditions and long lead times, complexity of our products, and changes in demand. We have entered and expect to continue to enter into supplier and capacity prepayment arrangements. We have procured substantially higher Data Center supply for the second half compared to the first half of fiscal year 2024. We may incur inventory provisions or impairments if our inventory or supply and capacity commitments are misaligned with demand for our products.
Our demand predictions may not be correct, as we have experienced from time to time. Product transitions are complex and can negatively impact our revenue as we often ship both new and prior architecture products simultaneously and we and our channel partners prepare to ship and support new products. Our architecture transitions of Data Center, Professional Visualization, and Gaming products may impair our ability to predict demand and impact our supply mix. Qualification time for new products, customers anticipating product transitions and channel partners reducing channel inventory of prior architectures ahead of new product introductions can create reductions or volatility in our revenue. We have experienced and may in the future experience reduced demand for current generation architectures when customers anticipate transitions, and we may be unable to sell multiple product architectures at the same time for current and future architecture transitions. If we are unable to execute our architectural transitions as planned for any reason, our financial results may be negatively impacted. In addition, the bring up of new product architectures is complex due to functionality challenges and quality concerns not identified in manufacturing testing. These product quality issues may incur costs, increase our warranty costs, and delay further production of our architecture. While we have managed prior product transitions and have previously sold multiple product architectures at the same time, these transitions are difficult, and we may incur additional costs.
We sell most of our products through channel partners, who sell to distributors, retailers, and/or end customers. As a result, the decisions made by our channel partners, distributors, retailers, and in response to changing market conditions and changes in end user demand for our products have impacted and could in the future continue to impact our ability to properly forecast demand, particularly as they are based on estimates provided by various downstream parties.
If we underestimate our customers' future demand for our products, our foundry partners may not have adequate lead-time or capacity to increase production and we may not be able to obtain sufficient inventory to fill orders on a timely basis. Even if we are able to increase production levels to meet customer demand, we may not be able to do so in a cost-effective or timely manner, or our contract manufacturers may experience supply constraints. If we fail to fulfill our customers’ orders on a timely basis, or at all, our customer relationships could be damaged, we could lose revenue and market share and our reputation could be harmed. Additionally, since some of our products are part of a complex data center buildout, supply constraints or availability issues with respect to any one component have had and may have a broader revenue impact.
If we overestimate our customers’ future demand for our products, or if customers cancel or defer orders or choose to purchase from our competitors, we may not be able to reduce our inventory or other contractual purchase commitments. In the past, we have experienced a reduction in average selling prices, including due to channel pricing programs that we have implemented and may continue to implement, as a result of our overestimation of future demand, and we may need to continue these reductions. We have had to increase prices for certain of our products as a result of our suppliers’ increase in prices, and we may need to continue to do so for other products in the future. We have also written-down our inventory, incurred cancellation
penalties, and recorded impairments. These impacts were amplified by our placement of non-cancellable and non-returnable purchasing terms, well in advance of our historical lead times and could be exacerbated if we need to make changes to the design of future products. The risk of these impacts has increased as our purchase obligations and prepaids have grown and become a greater portion of our total supply. All of these factors may negatively impact our gross margins and financial results.
We build technology and products for use cases and applications that may be new or may not yet exist, such as our Omniverse platform, third-party large language models and generative AI models. Our demand estimates for these use cases and applications can be incorrect and create volatility in our revenue or supply levels, and we may not be able to generate significant revenue from these use cases and applications. New technologies such as generative AI models have emerged, and while they have driven increased demand for compute infrastructure, the long--term trajectory is unknown. Because our products may be used in multiple use cases and applications, it is difficult for us to estimate with any reasonable degree of precision the impact of generative AI models on our reported revenue or forecasted demand.
Challenges in estimating demand could become more pronounced or volatile in the future on both a global and regional basis. Extended lead times may occur if we experience other supply constraints caused by natural disasters, pandemics or other events. In addition, geopolitical tensions, such as those involving Taiwan and China, which comprise a significant portion of our revenue and where we have suppliers, contract manufacturers, and assembly partners who are critical to our supply continuity, could have a material adverse impact on us.
The use of our GPUs other than that for which they were designed and marketed, including new and unexpected use cases, has impacted and can in the future impact demand for our products, including by leading to inconsistent spikes and drops in demand. For example, several years ago, our Gaming GPUs began to be used for mining digital currencies such as Ethereum. It is difficult for us to estimate with any reasonable degree of precision the past or current impact of cryptocurrency mining, or forecast the future impact of cryptocurrency mining, on demand for our products. Volatility in the cryptocurrency market, including new compute technologies, price changes in cryptocurrencies, government cryptocurrency policies and regulations, new cryptocurrency standards, and changes in the method of verifying blockchain transactions, has impacted and can in the future impact cryptocurrency mining and demand for our products and can further impact our ability to estimate demand for our products. Changes to cryptocurrency standards and processes including, but not limited to, the Ethereum 2.0 merge in 2022, have reduced and may in the future decrease the usage of GPUs for Ethereum mining. This has created and may in the future create increased aftermarket sales of our GPUs, which could negatively impact retail prices for our GPUs and reduce demand for our new GPUs. We previously introduced Lite Hash Rate, or LHR, GeForce GPUs with limited Ethereum mining capability and provided CMP products in an effort to address demand from gamers and direct miners to CMP. Following the Ethereum 2.0 merge, NVIDIA Ampere and Ada Lovelace GPU architectures no longer include LHR. In general, our new products or previously sold products may be resold online or on the unauthorized “gray market,” which also makes demand forecasting difficult. Gray market products and reseller marketplaces compete with our new products and distribution channels.
Additionally, we depend on developers, customers, and other third parties to build, enhance, and maintain accelerated computing applications that leverage our platforms. We also rely on third-party content providers and publishers to make their content available on our platforms such as GeForce NOW. Failure by developers, customers, and other third parties to build, enhance, and maintain applications that leverage our platforms, or failure by third-party content providers or publishers to make their content available on reasonable terms or at all for use by our customers or end users on our platforms, could adversely affect customer demand.
Adverse economic conditions may harm our business.
Economic and industry uncertainty or changes, including recession or slowing growth, inflation, changes or uncertainty in fiscal, monetary, or trade policy, disruptions to capital markets and the banking system, currency fluctuations, higher interest rates, tighter credit, lower capital expenditures by businesses, including on IT infrastructure, increases in unemployment, labor shortages, and lower consumer confidence and spending, have in the past and/or could in the future have adverse, wide-ranging effects on our business and financial results, including:
•increased costs for wafers, components, logistics, and other supply chain expenses, which have negatively impacted our gross margin and may continue to do so;
•increased supply, employee, facilities and infrastructure costs and volatility in the financial markets, which have reduced and may in the future reduce our margins;
•decrease in demand for our products, services and technologies and those of our customers, partners or licensees;
•the inability of our suppliers to deliver on their supply commitments to us and our customers’ or our licensees’ inability to supply products to customers and/or end users;
•limits on our ability to forecast operating results and make business decisions;
•the insolvency of key suppliers, distributors, customers, cloud service providers, data center providers, licensing parties, or other third parties we rely on; reduced profitability may also cause some customers to scale back operations, exit businesses, or file for bankruptcy protection and potentially cease operations; lead to mergers, consolidations or strategic alliances among other companies, which could adversely affect our ability to compete effectively; and
•increased credit and collectability risks, higher borrowing costs or reduced availability of capital markets, reduced liquidity, adverse impacts on our suppliers, failures of counterparties including financial institutions and insurers, asset impairments, and declines in the value of our financial instruments. Adverse developments affecting financial institutions, such as bank failures, or concerns or speculation about similar events or risks, could lead to market-wide liquidity problems and other disruptions, which could impact our customers’ ability to fulfill their payment obligations to us, our vendors’ ability to fulfill their contractual obligations to us, or our ability to fulfill our own obligations.
Additionally, we maintain an investment portfolio of various holdings, types, and maturities. These investments are subject to general credit, liquidity, market, and interest rate risks, which may be exacerbated by market downturns or events that affect global financial markets as described above. A majority of our investment portfolio comprises U.S. government securities. A decline in global financial markets for long periods or a downgrade of the U.S. government credit rating due to an actual or threatened default on government debt could result in higher interest rates, a decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, reduced market liquidity, or other adverse conditions. These factors could cause an unrealized or realized loss position in our investments or require us to record impairment charges.
Product, system security, and data protection breaches, as well as cyber-attacks, have the potential to disrupt our operations, reduce our expected revenue, increase our expenses, and significantly harm our business and reputation.
Security breaches, computer malware, social-engineering attacks, denial-of-service attacks, software bugs, server malfunctions, software or hardware failures, loss of data or other information technology assets, and other cyber-attacks are increasingly sophisticated, making it more difficult to successfully detect, defend against them or implement adequate preventative measures.
Cyber-attacks, including ransomware attacks by organized criminal threat actors, nation-states, and nation-state-supported actors, may become more prevalent and severe. Our ability to recover from ransomware attacks may be limited if our backups have been affected by the attack, or if restoring from backups is delayed or not feasible.
Individuals, groups of hackers and sophisticated organizations, including nation-states and nation-state-supported actors, and other threat actors now engage and are expected to continue to engage in cyber-attacks. Additionally, some actors are using AI technology to launch more automated, targeted and coordinated attacks. Due to geopolitical conflicts and during times of war or other major conflicts, we and the third parties upon which we rely may be vulnerable to a heightened risk of cyber-attacks that could materially disrupt our ability to provide services and products. We may also face cybersecurity threats due to error or intentional misconduct by employees, contractors, or other third-party service providers. Furthermore, we rely on products and services provided by third-party suppliers to operate certain critical business systems, including without limitation, cloud-based infrastructure, encryption and authentication technology, employee email, and other functions, which exposes us to supply-chain attacks or other business
disruptions. We cannot guarantee that third parties and infrastructure in our supply chain or our partners’ supply chains have not been compromised or that they do not contain exploitable defects or bugs that could result in a breach of or disruption to our information technology systems, including our products and services, or the third-party information technology systems that support our services. We may also incorporate third party data into our AI algorithms or use open-source datasets to train our algorithms; these datasets may be flawed, insufficient, or contain certain biased information. We may have limited insight into the data privacy or security practices of third-party data suppliers for our AI algorithms. Our ability to monitor these third parties’ information security practices is limited, and they may not have adequate information security measures in place. In addition, if one of our third-party suppliers suffers a security breach, our response may be limited or more difficult because we may not have direct access to their systems, logs and other information related to the security breach. Additionally, we are incorporated into the supply chain of a large number of entities worldwide and, as a result, if our products or services are compromised, a significant number of our customers and their data could be affected, which could result in potential liability and harm our business.
To defend against cyber-attacks, we must continuously engineer more secure products and enhance security and reliability features, which is expected to result in increased expenses. We must also continue to develop our security measures, including training programs and security awareness initiatives, to ensure our suppliers have appropriate security measures in place, and continue to meet the evolving security requirements of our customers, applicable industry standards, and government regulations. While we invest in training programs and security awareness initiatives and take steps to detect and remediate certain vulnerabilities that we have identified, we may not always be able to prevent threats or detect all vulnerabilities in our security controls, systems or software, including third-party software we have installed, as such threats and techniques change frequently and may not be detected until after a security incident has occurred. Further, we may experience delays in developing and deploying remedial measures designed to address identified vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could result in reputational and financial harm.
We hold confidential, sensitive, personal, and proprietary information, including information from partners and customers. Breaches of our security measures, along with reported or perceived vulnerabilities or unapproved dissemination of proprietary information or sensitive or confidential data about us or third parties could expose us and the parties affected to a risk of loss or misuse of this information, potentially resulting in litigation and subsequent liability, regulatory inquiries or actions, damage to our brand and reputation or other harm, including financial, to our business. For example, we hold proprietary game source code from third-party partners in our GFN service. Breaches of our GFN security measures, which have happened in the past, could expose our partners to a risk of loss or misuse of this source code, damage both us and our partners, and expose NVIDIA to potential litigation and liability. If we or a third party we rely on experience a security incident, which has occurred in the past, or are perceived to have experienced a security incident, we may experience adverse consequences, including government enforcement actions, additional reporting requirements and/or oversight, restrictions on processing data, litigation, indemnification obligations, reputational harm, diversion of funds, financial loss, loss of data, material disruptions in our systems and operations, supply chain, and ability to produce, sell and distribute our goods and services, and other similar harms. Inability to fulfill orders, delayed sales, lower margins or lost customers as a result of these disruptions could adversely affect our financial results, stock price and reputation. In addition to experiencing a security incident, third parties may gather, collect, or infer sensitive information about us from public sources, data brokers, or other means that reveals competitively sensitive details about our organization and could be used to harm our business.
Business disruptions could harm our operations, lead to a decline in revenue and increase our costs.
Our worldwide operations could be disrupted by natural disasters and extreme weather conditions, power or water shortages, telecommunications failures, supplier disruptions, terrorist attacks, or acts of violence, political and/or civil unrest, acts of war or other military actions, epidemics or pandemics, abrupt regulatory deterioration, and other natural or man-made disasters and catastrophic events. Our corporate headquarters, a large portion of our current data center capacity, and a portion of our research and development activities are located in California, and other critical business operations, finished goods inventory, and some of our suppliers are located in Asia, making our operations vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires, or other business disruptions occurring in these geographical areas. Catastrophic events can also have an impact on third-party vendors who provide us critical infrastructure services for IT and research and development systems and personnel. Geopolitical and domestic political developments and other events beyond our control, can increase economic volatility globally. Political instability, changes in government or
adverse political developments in or around any of the major countries in which we do business would also likely harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. Worldwide geopolitical tensions and conflicts, including but not limited to China, Hong Kong, Israel, Korea and Taiwan where the manufacture of our product components and final assembly of our products are concentrated may result in changing regulatory requirements, and other disruptions that could impact our operations and operating strategies, product demand, access to global markets, hiring, and profitability. For example, other countries have restricted and may continue in the future to restrict business with the State of Israel, where we have engineering, sales support operations and manufacturing, and companies with Israeli operations, including by economic boycotts. Our operations could be harmed and our costs could increase if manufacturing, logistics or other operations are disrupted for any reason, including natural disasters, high heat events or water shortages, information technology system failures, military actions or economic, business, labor, environmental, public health, or political issues. The ultimate impact on us, our third-party foundries and other suppliers of being located and consolidated in certain geographical areas is unknown. In the event a disaster, war or catastrophic event affects us, the third-party systems on which we rely, or our customers, our business could be harmed as a result of declines in revenue, increases in expenses, and substantial expenditures and time spent to fully resume operations. All of these risks and conditions could materially adversely affect our future sales and operating results.
Additionally, interruptions or delays in services from cloud service providers, data center co-location partners, and other third parties on which we rely for any reason, including the events described above or other events such as the insolvency of these parties, could impair our ability to provide our products and services and harm our business. As we increase our reliance on these third-party systems and services, our exposure to damage from service interruptions, defects, disruptions, outages and other performance and quality problems may increase.
Climate change may have a long-term impact on our business.
Climate change may have an increasingly adverse impact on our business and those of our customers, partners and vendors. Water and energy availability and reliability in the communities where we conduct business is critical, and certain of our facilities may be vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather events. Extreme heat and wind coupled with dry conditions in Northern California may lead to power safety shut offs due to wildfire risk, which can have adverse implications for our Santa Clara, California headquarter offices and data centers, including impairing the ability of our employees to work effectively. Climate change, its impact on our supply chain and critical infrastructure worldwide, and its potential to increase political instability in regions where we, our customers, partners and our vendors do business, may disrupt our business and cause us to experience higher attrition, losses and costs to maintain or resume operations. Although we maintain insurance coverage for a variety of property, casualty, and other risks, the types and amounts of insurance we obtain vary depending on availability and cost. Some of our policies have large deductibles and broad exclusions, and our insurance providers may be unable or unwilling to pay a claim. Losses not covered by insurance may be large, which could harm our results of operations and financial condition.
Our business and those of our suppliers and customers may also be subject to climate-related laws, regulations and lawsuits. Regulations relating to carbon taxes, fuel or energy taxes, and pollution limits, such as proposed SEC rules and the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, could result in greater direct costs, including costs associated with changes to manufacturing processes or the procurement of raw materials used in manufacturing processes, increased capital expenditures to improve facilities and equipment, and higher compliance and energy costs to reduce emissions, other compliance costs, as well as greater indirect costs resulting from our customers and/or suppliers incurring additional compliance costs that are passed on to us. These costs and restrictions could harm our business and results of operations by increasing our expenses or requiring us to alter our operations and product design activities. Stakeholder groups may find us insufficiently responsive to the implications of climate change, and therefore we may face legal action or reputational harm. We may not achieve our stated goals to source 100% of our global electricity use from renewable energy by the end of fiscal year 2025 and annually thereafter and to engage manufacturing suppliers comprising at least 67% of our scope 3 category 1 greenhouse gas emissions with the goal of effecting supplier adoption of science-based targets aligned with limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of fiscal year 2026, which could harm our reputation, or we may incur additional, unexpected costs to achieve such goals. We may also experience contractual disputes due to supply chain delays arising from climate change-related disruptions, which could result in increased litigation and costs.
We also face risks related to business trends that may be influenced by climate change concerns. Our business could be negatively impacted by decreased demand for computationally powerful but energy intensive products, such as our GPUs, despite their energy efficient design and operation, and/or by increased consumer or customer expectations around the energy efficiency of our products.
We receive a significant amount of our revenue from a limited number of customers and our revenue could be adversely affected if we lose or are prevented from selling to any of these customers.
We receive a significant amount of our revenue from a limited number of customers within our distribution and partner network. With several of these distributors and partners, we are selling multiple target market platforms through their channels. Our operating results depend on sales within our partner network, as well as the ability of these partners to sell products that incorporate our processors. In the future, these partners may decide to purchase fewer products, not to incorporate our products into their ecosystem, or to alter their purchasing patterns in some other way. Because most of our sales are made on a purchase order basis, our customers can generally cancel, change or delay product purchase commitments with little notice to us and without penalty. Our partners or customers may develop their own solutions; our customers may purchase products from our competitors; and our partners may discontinue sales or lose market share in the markets for which they purchase our products, all of which may alter partners’ or customers’ purchasing patterns. Our estimated Compute & Networking end customer demand is concentrated among a few large cloud service providers and consumer internet companies. Some of these large companies do not purchase directly from us but often purchase through several system builders and channel partners. We expect this trend will continue. If end demand increases or our finished goods supply availability is concentrated near a quarter end, the system builders and channel partners may have limited ability to increase their credit, which could impact the timing and amount of our revenue. The loss of any of our large customers, a significant reduction in purchases by them, our inability to sell to a customer due to U.S. or other countries’ trade restrictions, or any difficulties in collecting accounts receivable would likely harm our financial condition and results of operations.
Our operating results have in the past fluctuated and may in the future fluctuate, and if our operating results are below the expectations of securities analysts or investors, our stock price could decline.
Our operating results have in the past fluctuated and may continue to fluctuate due to numerous factors described in these risk factors. Therefore, investors should not rely on past comparisons of our results of operations as an indication of our future performance. Additional factors that could affect our results of operations include, but are not limited to:
•our ability to adjust spending to offset revenue shortfalls due to the multi-year development cycle for some of our products and services;
•our ability to comply with our contractual obligations to customers;
•our extended payment term arrangements with certain customers, the inability of some customers to make required payments, our ability to obtain credit insurance for customers with extended payment terms, and customer bad debt write-offs;
•our vendors' payment requirements;
•unanticipated costs associated with environmental liabilities; and
•changes in financial accounting standards or interpretations of existing standards.
Any of the factors discussed above could prevent us from achieving our anticipated financial results. For example, we have granted and may continue to grant extended payment terms to some customers, particularly during macroeconomic downturns, which could impact our ability to collect payment. Our vendors have requested and may continue to ask for shorter payment terms, which may impact our cash flow generation. These arrangements reduce the cash we have available for general business operations. In addition, the timing of our operating expenses and investments may lag our revenue growth, creating volatility or periods where current profitability may not be sustainable. Failure to meet our expectations or the expectations of our investors or security analysts is likely to cause our stock price to decline, as it has in the past, or experience substantial price volatility.
Our operations could be affected by the complex laws, rules and regulations to which our business is subject, and political and other actions may adversely impact our business.
We are subject to laws and regulations domestically and worldwide, affecting our operations in areas including, but not limited to, IP ownership and infringement; taxes; import and export requirements and tariffs; anti-corruption, including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; 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. Compliance with such requirements can be onerous and expensive, could impact our competitive position, and may negatively impact our business operations and ability to manufacture and ship our products. There can be no assurance that our employees, contractors, suppliers, customers or agents will not violate applicable laws or the policies, controls, and procedures that we have designed to help ensure compliance with such laws, and violations could result in fines, criminal sanctions against us, our officers, or our employees, prohibitions on the conduct of our business, and damage to our reputation. Changes to the laws, rules and regulations to which we are subject, or changes to their interpretation and enforcement, could lead to materially greater compliance and other costs and/or further restrictions on our ability to manufacture and supply our products and operate our business. For example, we may face increased compliance costs as a result of changes or increases in antitrust legislation, regulation, administrative rule making, increased focus from regulators on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risks, and enforcement activity resulting from growing public concern over concentration of economic power in corporations. Revisions to laws or regulations or their interpretation and enforcement could also result in increased taxation, trade sanctions, the imposition of or increase to import duties or tariffs, restrictions and controls on imports or exports, or other retaliatory actions, which could have an adverse effect on our business plans or impact the timing of our shipments. Additionally, changes in the public perception of governments in the regions where we operate or plan to operate could negatively impact our business and results of operations.
Government actions, including trade protection and national security policies of U.S. and foreign government bodies, such as tariffs, import or export regulations, including deemed export restrictions and restrictions on the activities of U.S. persons, trade and economic sanctions, decrees, quotas or other trade barriers and restrictions could affect our ability to ship products, provide services to our customers and employees, do business without an export license with entities on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s U.S. Entity List or other U.S. government restricted parties lists (which is expected to change from time to time), and generally fulfill our contractual obligations and have a material adverse effect on our business. If we were ever found to have violated export control laws or sanctions of the U.S. or similar applicable non-U.S. laws, even if the violation occurred without our knowledge, we may be subject to various penalties available under the laws, any of which could have a material and adverse impact on our business, operating results and financial condition.
For example, in response to the war in Ukraine, the United States and other jurisdictions imposed economic sanctions and export control measures which blocked the passage of our products, services and support into Russia, Belarus, and certain regions of Ukraine. In fiscal year 2023, we stopped direct sales to Russia and closed business operations in Russia. Concurrently, the war in Ukraine has impacted end customer sales in EMEA and may continue to do so in the future.
The increasing focus on the risks and strategic importance of AI technologies has already resulted in regulatory restrictions that target products and services capable of enabling or facilitating AI, and may in the future result in additional restrictions impacting some or all of our product and service offerings.
Concerns regarding third-party use of AI for purposes contrary to local governmental interests, including concerns relating to the misuse of AI applications, models, and solutions, could result in unilateral or multilateral restrictions on products that can be used for training, refining, and deploying large language models. Such restrictions could limit the ability of downstream customers and users worldwide to acquire, deploy, and use systems that include our products, software, and services, and negatively impact our business and financial results.
Such restrictions could include additional unilateral or multilateral export controls on certain products or technology, including but not limited to AI technologies. As geopolitical tensions have increased, semiconductors associated with AI, including GPUs and associated products, are increasingly the focus of
export control restrictions proposed by stakeholders in the U.S. and its allies, and it is likely that additional unilateral or multilateral controls will be adopted. Such controls may be very broad in scope and application, prohibit us from exporting our products to any or all customers in one or more markets, including but not limited to China, and could negatively impact our manufacturing, testing, and warehousing locations and options, or could impose other conditions that limit our ability to serve demand abroad and could negatively and materially impact our business, revenue, and financial results. Export controls targeting GPUs and semiconductors associated with AI, which are increasingly likely, would restrict our ability to export our technology, products, or services even though competitors may not be subject to similar restrictions, creating a competitive disadvantage for us and negatively impacting our business and financial results. Potential export controls targeting GPUs and semiconductors associated with AI may also subject downstream users of our products to additional restrictions on the use, resale, repair, or transfer of our products, negatively impacting our business and financial results. Controls could negatively impact our cost and/or ability to provide services such as NVIDIA AI cloud services and could impact the cost and/or ability of our cloud customers to provide services to their end customers, even outside China.
Export controls could disrupt our supply chain and distribution channels even for our gaming products, negatively impacting our ability to serve demand, even in markets outside China. Even the possibility of additional export controls may negatively impact demand for our products, benefitting competitors that offer alternatives less likely to be restricted by further controls. Repeated changes in the export control rules are likely to impose compliance burdens on our business and our customers, negatively and materially impacting our business.
Increasing use of economic sanctions and export controls may also impact demand for our products or services, negatively impacting our business and financial results. Additional unilateral or multilateral controls are also likely to include deemed export control limitations that negatively impact the ability of our research and development teams to execute our roadmap or other objectives in a timely manner. Additional export restrictions may not only impact our ability to serve overseas markets, but also provoke responses from foreign governments, including China, that negatively impact our supply chain or our ability to provide our products and services to customers in all markets worldwide, which could also substantially reduce our revenue.
During the third quarter of fiscal year 2023, the USG announced export restrictions and export licensing requirements targeting China’s semiconductor and supercomputing industries. These restrictions impact exports of certain chips, as well as software, hardware, equipment, and technology used to develop, produce, and manufacture certain chips, to China (including Hong Kong and Macau) and Russia, and specifically impact our A100 and H100 integrated circuits, DGX or any other systems or boards which incorporate A100 or H100 integrated circuits. The license requirements also apply to any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving certain peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance thresholds, as well as any system or board that includes those circuits. There are also now licensing requirements to export a wide array of products, including networking products, destined for certain end users and for certain end uses in China.
Following the 2022 export controls, we transitioned some operations, including certain testing, validation, and supply and distribution operations out of China and Hong Kong. Any future transitions could be costly and time consuming, and adversely affect our research and development and supply and distribution operations, as well as our revenue, during any such transition period.
We have sold alternative products in China not subject to the license requirements, such as our A800 or H800 offerings. To the extent that a customer requires products covered by the license requirements, we may seek a license for the customer but have no assurance that the USG will grant any exemptions or licenses for any customer, or that the USG will act on them in a timely manner. The requirements have a disproportionate impact on NVIDIA and may disadvantage NVIDIA against certain of our competitors who sell products that are not subject to the new restrictions or may be able to acquire licenses for their products.
Management of these new license and other requirements is complicated and time consuming. Our results and competitive position may be harmed if there are further changes in the USG’s export controls, if customers in China do not want to purchase our alternative product offerings, if customers purchase product from competitors, if customers develop their own internal solution, if we are unable to provide contractual warranty or other extended service obligations, if the USG does not grant licenses in a timely manner or denies licenses to significant customers, or if we incur significant transition costs. Additionally, if we are unable to sell our alternative product offerings in China, we may have excess inventory, harming our
results. Even if the USG grants any requested licenses, the licenses may be temporary or impose burdensome conditions that we cannot or choose not to fulfill. The new requirements may benefit certain of our competitors, as the licensing process will make our pre-sale and post-sale technical support efforts more cumbersome and less certain, and encourage customers in China to pursue alternatives to our products, including semiconductor suppliers based in China, Europe, and Israel. Given the increasing strategic importance of AI and rising geopolitical tensions, the USG may unilaterally change the export control rules at any time and subject a wide range of our products, including but not limited to A800, H800, and gaming products such as RTX 4090, 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 license requirements, effectively excluding us from all or part of the China market. For example, the USG has been under pressure from some commentators to impose strict conditions for export, such as requirements that every GPU above a certain capability include tamper-proof means to automatically detect the configuration and use of a system as well as an “auto-kill” or “auto-throttle” mechanism that would disable or impair GPUs if certain system or use conditions are detected. Such restrictions would be infeasible, and if imposed by the USG, would be tantamount to a blanket export control on products exceeding the thresholds. Export controls restricting our gaming products, such as RTX 4090, may disrupt a significant portion of our supply and distribution chain and negatively impact sales of such products to markets outside China, including the U.S. and Europe. Export controls may disrupt our supply and distribution chain for a substantial portion of our products, which are warehoused in and distributed from Hong Kong. Export controls restricting our ability to sell datacenter GPUs may also negatively impact demand for our networking products used in servers containing our GPUs. Any new control that impacts a wide range of our products, including but not limited to A800, H800, and RTX4090 would likely have a disproportionate impact on NVIDIA and may disadvantage us against certain of our competitors that sell chips that are outside the scope of such control. Excessive or shifting export controls may also encourage customers outside China to “design-out” U.S. semiconductors from their products to reduce the compliance burden and risk, and to ensure that they are able to serve markets worldwide. As a result, excessive or shifting export controls may negatively impact demand for our products and services not only in China, but also in other markets, such as Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Excessive or shifting export controls increase the risk of investing in U.S. advanced semiconductor products, because by the time a new product is ready for market, it may be subject to new unilateral export controls restricting its sale. At the same time, such controls may increase investment in foreign competitors, which would be less likely to be restricted by U.S. controls.
Additionally, restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on the duration of gaming activities and access to games may adversely affect our Gaming revenue, and increased oversight of digital platform companies may adversely affect our Data Center revenue. The Chinese government may impose restrictions on the sale to certain end customers of our products, or any products containing components made by our partners and suppliers. For example, the Chinese government recently announced restrictions relating to certain sales of products containing certain products made by Micron, a supplier of ours. Further restrictions on our products or the products of our suppliers could negatively impact our business and financial results.
Finally, our business depends on our ability to receive consistent and reliable supply from our overseas partners, especially in Taiwan. Any new restrictions that negatively impact our ability to receive supply of components, parts, or services from Taiwan, would negatively impact our business and financial results.
Issues relating to the responsible use of our technologies, including AI in our offerings, may result in reputational or financial harm and liability.
Concerns relating to the responsible use of new and evolving technologies, such as AI, in our products and services may result in reputational or financial harm and liability, and may cause us to incur costs to resolve such issues. We are increasingly building AI capabilities into many of our products and services and we also offer stand-alone AI applications. AI poses emerging ethical issues and presents risks and challenges that could affect its adoption, and therefore our business. If we enable or offer solutions that draw controversy due to their perceived or actual impact on society, such as AI solutions that have unintended consequences or are controversial because of their impact on human rights, privacy, employment, or other social, economic, or political issues, or if we are unable to develop effective internal policies and frameworks relating to the responsible development and use of AI models and systems offered through our sales channels, we may experience brand or reputational harm, competitive harm or legal liability. Complying with multiple regulations from different jurisdictions related to AI could increase our cost of doing business or may change the way
that we operate in certain jurisdictions. Compliance with government regulation in the area of AI use and ethics may also increase the cost of related research and development, and changes in AI-related regulation could disproportionately impact and disadvantage us and require us to change our business practices, which may negatively impact our financial results. Our failure to address concerns relating to the responsible use of AI by us or others could undermine public confidence in AI and slow adoption of AI in our products and services or cause reputational harm.