Quote:Back in 2017 when cryptocurrency was all the hype, people were buying every graphics card they could get their hands on, which was quite the party for AMD and Nvidia. Now, it looks like Nvidia is getting sued by some upset investors who claim Nvidia mislead them by reporting crypto revenue as gaming revenue, according to a report at The Register.

The original lawsuit was started in 2017, but it is only this week that the actual complaint has been filed in California.

During the crypto-craze, coin miners would buy up every GPU they were able to obtain, which lead to massive shortages and severely increased the prices of graphics cards to levels at which gamers wouldn't be buying them anymore.

"Sales data demonstrated that, throughout 2017, 60% to 70% of NVIDIA's GeForce revenue in China came from sales to crypto-miners, not gamers." reads the complaint. Such figures are similar elsewhere around the world, though likely varied a little depending on the popularity of mining and electricity prices. It's also worth noting that the Chinese market accounted for the majority of Nvidia's sales.
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According to the report on The Register, Nvidia hasn't responded to the allegations. There are a number of ways this can pan out, but at the end of the day we don't expect much will come from the complaint.

Nvidia's revenues were divided up into five segments: Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter, Auto, and OEM & IP. Given these categories, it's only logical that GPUs that were engineered and built for gaming would be reported as part of the Gaming division, even if a whole lot of people were using them for something else.

Everybody knew that the gaming GPUs were being used for mining, and therefore also that the inflated gaming division numbers weren't going to last. As an investor, you have a responsibility to yourself to research what you're investing in. You shouldn't buy a product simply because the manufacturer says it's the best, so why would that be any different when buying shares?

Quote:NVIDIA has (not surprisingly) dismissed allegations that it had misled investors in regard to demand towards its GeForce graphics products circa 2017. The original allegation claimed that NVIDIA has wrongfully misrepresented GeForce division sales to investors by including crypto-focused sales on its bottom line. This, investors claim, painted a safer investment opportunity on NVIDIA stock than it actually was - the volatility of the crypto market and associated unpredictability in NVIDIA GeForce products' demand being the sore point for investors. Demand of GeForce products for gaming is considered to be less risk-averse and less elastic than crypto-focused sales.

NVIDIA says that investors cherry-picked corporate statements while ignoring others that, according to NVIDIA, showed transparency. The ammended class suit, which was amended in May 2020 from its original 2017 entry date, accuses Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Jeff Fisher, head of gaming, claiming they knew the rise in GeForce GPU sales was linked to the crypto mining boom and wasn't going to last in the long-term. NVIDIA says that executives didn't lie when they described crypto sales as a "small portion" of their revenue (which was disclosed at $6.9 billion for the year 2017). Another contention point from NVIDIA is that executives in the company (and the company itself) had no way of knowing ecactly what purpoze its sold GPUs were being put to.