UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

None

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See definitions of “large accelerated filer”, “accelerated filer”, “smaller reporting company”, and "emerging growth company" in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

The aggregate market value of the voting stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant as of July 27, 201826, 2019 was approximately $146.66$102.15 billion (based on the closing sales price of the registrant's common stock as reported by the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 27, 2018)26, 2019). This calculation excludes 26 million shares held by directors and executive officers of the registrant. This calculation does not exclude shares held by such organizations whose ownership exceeds 5% of the registrant's outstanding common stock that have represented to the registrant that they are registered investment advisers or investment companies registered under section 8 of the Investment Company Act of 1940.

The number of shares of common stock outstanding as of February 15, 201914, 2020 was 606612 million.

WHERE YOU CAN FIND MORE INFORMATION

Investors and others should note that we announce material financial information to our investors using our investor relations website, press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts. We also use the following social media channels as a means of disclosing information about the company, our products, our planned financial and other announcements and attendance at upcoming investor and industry conferences, and other matters and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD:

NVIDIA Twitter Account (https://twitter.com/nvidia)

NVIDIA Company Blog (http://blogs.nvidia.com)

NVIDIA Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/nvidia)

NVIDIA LinkedIn Page (http://www.linkedin.com/company/nvidia)

NVIDIA Instagram Page (https://www.instagram.com/nvidia)

In addition, investors and others can view NVIDIA videos on YouTube.

The information we post through these social media channels may be deemed material. Accordingly, investors should monitor these accounts and the blog, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings and public conference calls and webcasts. This list may be updated from time to time. The information we post through these channels is not a part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. These channels may be updated from time to time on NVIDIA's investor relations website.

Forward-Looking Statements

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to the “safe harbor” created by those sections. Forward-looking statements are based on our management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to our management. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “could,” “goal,” “would,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “project,” “predict,” “potential” and similar expressions intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause our actual results, performance, time frames or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, time frames or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. We discuss many of these risks, uncertainties and other factors in this Annual Report on Form 10-K in greater detail under the heading “Risk Factors.” Given these risks, uncertainties and other factors, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Also, these forward-looking statements represent our estimates and assumptions only as of the date of this filing. You should read this Annual Report on Form 10-K completely and with the understanding that our actual future results may be materially different from what we expect. We hereby qualify our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

All references to “NVIDIA,” “we,” “us,” “our” or the “Company” mean NVIDIA Corporation and its subsidiaries.

In addition, statements that “we believe” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based upon information available to us as of the filing date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K , and while we believe such information forms a reasonable basis for such statements, such information may be limited or incomplete, and our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all potentially available relevant information. These statements are inherently uncertain and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely upon these statements.

© 20192020 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, GeForce, Quadro, Tegra, Tesla, CUDA, CUDA-X AI, GeForce Experience, GeForce NOW, GeForce RTX, G-SYNC, Jetson, NVIDIA Clara, NVIDIA DesignWorks, NVIDIA DGX, NVIDIA DGX SUPERPOD, NVIDIA DRIVE, NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation, NVIDIA GameWorks, NVIDIA GRID, NVIDIA HGX,Omniverse, NVIDIA RTX, NVIDIA VRWorks, NVLink, NVSwitch, Quadro RTX, SHIELD and SHIELDTensorRT are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

PART I

ITEM 1. BUSINESS

Our Company

NVIDIA pioneered accelerated computing to help solve the most challenging computational problems. Starting with a focus on PC graphics, NVIDIA invented the graphics processing unit, or GPU, to solve some of the most complex problems in computer science. We havewe extended our focus in recent years to the revolutionary field of artificial intelligence, or AI. Fueled by the sustained demand for betterexceptional 3D graphics and the scale of the gaming market, NVIDIA has evolved theleveraged its GPU into a computer brain at the intersection ofarchitecture to create platforms for virtual reality, or VR, high performance computing, or HPC, and AI.

The GPU was initially used to simulate human imagination, enabling the virtual worlds of video games and films. Today, it also simulates human intelligence, enabling a deeper understanding of the physical world. Its parallel processing capabilities, supported by up to thousands of computing cores, are essential to running deep learning algorithms. This form of AI, in which software writes itself by learning from data, can serve as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. GPU-powered deep learning continues to be adopted by thousands of enterprises to deliver services and features that would have been impossible with traditional coding.

NVIDIA has a platform strategy, bringing together hardware, system software, programmable algorithms, libraries, systems, and services to create unique value for the markets we serve. While the requirements of these end markets are diverse, we address them with a unified underlying architecture leveraging our GPUs and Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA, as the fundamental building blocks.software stacks. The programmable nature of our architecture allows us to support several multi-billion dollarmulti-billion-dollar end markets with the same underlying technology by using a variety of software stacks developed either internally or by third party developers and partners. The large and growing number of developers across our platforms strengthens our ecosystem and increases the value of our platform to our customers.

Innovation is at our core. We have invested over $17$20 billion in research and development since our inception, yielding inventions that are essential to modern computing. Our invention of the GPU in 1999 defined modern computer graphics and established NVIDIA as the leader in visual computing. With our introduction of the CUDA programming model in 2006, we opened the parallel processing capabilities of the GPU for general purpose computing. This approach significantly accelerates the performance of the most demanding applications in HPC in fields such as aerospace, bio-science research, mechanical and fluid simulations, and energy exploration. Today, our GPUs power many of the fastest supercomputers across the world. In addition, the massively parallel compute architecture of our GPUs and associated software have proven to beare well suited for deep learning and are now expanding into machine learning, powering the era of AI. AsWhile traditional CPU-based approaches no longer deliver advances on the laws of physics have begun to slow downpace described by Moore’s Law, we continue to deliver GPU performance improvements on a pace ahead of Moore’s Law, giving the industry a path forward.

Gamers choose NVIDIA GPUs to enjoy immersive, increasingly cinematic virtual worlds. GPUs also help underpin the world’s fastest growing spectator sport, eSports, which attracts hundreds of millions of viewers to watch top-quality gaming. A rapidly growing new genre of Battle Royale games, such as Fortnite, is also expanding the gaming market.

Researchers use our GPUs to accelerate a wide range of important applications, from simulating virusesmolecular dynamics to exploring the origins of the universe.weather forecasting. With support for more than 550over 600 applications - including the top 15 HPC applications - NVIDIA GPUs enable some of the most promising areas of discovery, from weather prediction to materials science and from wind tunnel simulation to genomics. In 2018, NVIDIA GPUs poweredpower the top two supercomputers in the world, located at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in the United States, as well as the top supercomputers in Europe and Japan. FiveIn all, NVIDIA powers 136 of the six finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize, awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery for outstanding achievement in the field of computing for applications in science, engineering and large-scale data science, did their work on the NVIDIA-powered top-twoTOP500 supercomputers.

The world’s leading cloud service providers use our GPUs to enable, accelerate or enrich the services they deliver to billions of end-users, including search, social networking, online shopping, live video, translation, AI assistants, navigation, and cloud computing.

A rapidly growing number of enterprises and startups use our GPUs to facilitatefor deep learning that meets, and in several cases surpasses, human perception, in fields ranging from radiology to precision agriculture. For example, the transportation industry is turning to our GPUs and AI to enable autonomous vehicles, or AVs, with several hundred companies and organizations working with NVIDIA’s DRIVE platform.

Our Businesses

Our two reportable segments - GPU and Tegra Processor - are based on a single underlying architecture. Our GPU product brands are aimed at specialized markets including GeForce for gamers; Quadro for designers; Tesla and DGX for AI data scientists and big data researchers; and GRID for cloud-based visual computing users. Our Tegra brand integrates an entire computer onto a single chip, and incorporates GPUs and multi-core CPUs to drive supercomputing for autonomous robots, drones, and cars, as well as for game consoles and mobile gaming and entertainment devices.

Our Markets

We specialize in markets in which GPU-based visual computing and accelerated computing platforms can provide tremendous throughput for applications. These platforms incorporate processors, systems software, programmable algorithms, systems, and services to deliver value that is unique in the marketplace. From our proprietary processors, we have created platforms that address four large markets where our expertise is critical: Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter,Data Center, and Automotive.

Computer gaming is the largest entertainment industry. Many factors propel computer gaming’s growth, including new high production value games and franchises, the rise of competitive online gaming, eSports, and the rise of virtual and augmented reality.

Our GPUs enhance the gaming experience by improving the visual quality of graphics, increasing the frame rate for smoother gameplay and improving realism by incorporating the behavior of light and physical objects. These can be enjoyed independently or together to extend the gaming experience across platforms.

Our gaming platforms utilize sophisticated 3D software and algorithms, including our GameWorks libraries that provide special effects for games. We further enhance gaming with GeForce Experience, our gaming application that optimizes the PC user’s settings for each title and enables players to record and share gameplay. It

We developed NVIDIA RTX ray tracing technology to enable real-time, cinematic-quality rendering in the RTX line-up of our gaming platforms. Ray tracing, which has long been downloaded by more than 100 million users.used for special effects in the movie industry, is a computationally intensive technique that simulates the physical behavior of light to achieve greater realism in computer-generated scenes.

To enable VR, we provide developers with a suite of software libraries called VRWorks. VRWorks allows developers to create fully immersive experiences by enabling physically realistic visuals, sound, touch interactions, and simulated environments. VR requires advanced high-performance GPUs as the engine to simulate complete immersion.

Our products for the gaming market include GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX GPUs for PC gaming, SHIELD devices for gaming and streaming, GeForce NOW for cloud-based gaming, as well as platforms and development services for specialized console gaming devices.

We serve the Professional Visualization market by working closely with independent software vendors to optimize their offerings for NVIDIA GPUs. Our GPU computing solutions enhance productivity and introduce new capabilities for critical parts of the workflow for such major industries as automotive, media and entertainment, architectural engineering, oil and gas, and medical imaging.

Designers who build the products we use every day need the images that they view digitally to mirror reality. This requires simulating the physical behavior of light and materials, or physically-based rendering, an emerging trend in professional design. Our DesignWorks software delivers this to designers and enables an architect designing a building with a computer-aided design package to interact with the model in real time, view it in greater detail, and generate photorealistic renderings for the client. It also allows an automotive designer to create a highly realistic 3D image of a car, which can be viewed from all angles, reducing reliance on costly, time-consuming full-scale clay models.

Just as VR is becoming more important in gaming, it is also being incorporated in a growing number of enterprise applications, including within medicine, architecture, product design, and retail. Virtual car showrooms, surgical training, architectural walkthroughs, and bringing historical scenes to life all deploy this technology, powered by our GPUs.

Visual computing is vital to productivity in many environments, including design and manufacturing and digital content creation. Design and manufacturing includes computer-aided design, architectural design, consumer-products manufacturing, medical instrumentation, and aerospace. Digital content creation includes professional video editing and post production, special effects for films, and broadcast-television graphics.

Our brand for this market is Quadro for workstations. Quadro GPUs enhance the productivity of designers by improving performance and adding functionality, such as photorealistic rendering, high color fidelity, and advanced scalable display capabilities. During fiscal year 2019, we introduced the NVIDIA RTX platform, making it possible to render film-quality, photorealistic objects and environments with physically accurate shadows, reflections and refractions using ray tracing in real-time.

The NVIDIA accelerated computing platform addresses AI and HPC applications. The platform consists of our energy efficient GPUs, our CUDA programming language, specific libraries such as cuDNN and TensorRT, and innovations such as NVLink and NVSwitch interconnects, which enablesenable application scalability across multiple GPUs.

In the field of AI, NVIDIA’s platform accelerates both deep learning and machine learning workloads. Deep learning is a computer science approach where neural networks are trained to recognize patterns from massive amounts of data in the form of images, sounds and text - in some instances better than humans. Machine learning is a related approach that leverages algorithms as well as data to learn how to make determinations or predictions, often used in data science. HPC, also referred to as scientific computing, uses numerical computational approaches to solve large and complex problems. For both AI and HPC applications, the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform greatly increases the performance and power efficiency of high-performance computers and datacenters,data centers, as GPUs excel at parallel workloads. For example, an NVIDIA GPU-accelerated machine learning cluster for data science is 1/8 the cost, 1/15 the space, and 1/18 the power of a traditional CPU-based cluster.

We are engaged with thousands of organizations working on AI in a multitude of industries, from automating tasks such as reading medical images, to enabling fraud detection in financial services, to optimizing oil exploration and drilling. These organizations include the world’s leading cloud services companies such as Amazon, Baidu, and Facebook, which are infusing AI in applications that enable highly accurate voice recognition and real-time translation; enterprises that are increasingly turning to AI to improve products and services; and startups seeking to implement AI in transformative ways across multiple industries. We have partnered with industry leaders such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and SAPVMware to bring AI to enterprise users. We also have partnerships in healthcare and manufacturing, among others, to accelerate the adoption of AI.

To enable deep learning and machine learning, we provide a family of GPUs designed to speed up training and inferencing of neural networks. They are available in industry standard servers from every major computer maker worldwide, including Cisco, Dell, HP, Inspur, and Lenovo; from every major cloud service provider such as Alicloud, Amazon Web Services, Baidu Cloud, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud; as well as in our DGX AI supercomputer, a purpose-built system for deep learning and GPU accelerated applications. DGX delivers performance equal to hundreds of conventional servers, comes fully integrated with hardware, software, development tools, support for AI frameworks, and runs popular accelerated applications. We also offer the NVIDIA GPU Cloud, or NGC, a comprehensive catalog of easy-to-use, optimized

software stacks across a range of domains including scientific computing, deep learning, and machine learning. With NGC,

GPUs also increase the speed of applications used in such fields as aerospace, bio-science research, mechanical and fluid simulations, and energy exploration. TheyGPUs have already had a significant impact onsignificantly impacted scientific discovery, including improving heart surgery, mapping human genome folds, seismic modeling, and weather simulations.

Accelerated computing is recognized as the path forward for computing amid the slowing of Moore’s Law. The proportion of supercomputers utilizing accelerators has grown sharply over the past five years, now accounting for a significant proportion of both the total systems on the TOP500 list, which ranks the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems, and the list’s total floating-point operations per second. Tesla GPU accelerators power many of the world’s fastest supercomputers, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s new generation of supercomputers, Summit and Sierra supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Europe’s fastest supercomputer - Piz Daint - in Switzerland, and Japan’s fastest supercomputer, ABCI.ABCI; and the world’s fastest industrial supercomputer by Italian energy company Eni.

We also serve the datacenterdata center market with GRID for virtualized graphics.graphics and Virtual Compute Server for virtualized AI and data science. GRID makes it possible to run graphics-intensive applications remotely on a server in the datacenter.data center. Applications include accelerating virtual desktop infrastructures and delivering graphics-intensive applications from the cloud for industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and educational institutions, among others. Virtual Compute Server (vComputeServer) enables data centers to accelerate server virtualization with GPUs so that the most compute-intensive workloads, such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, and data science, can be run in a virtual machine.

NVIDIA’s Automotive market is comprised of cockpit infotainment solutions, AV platforms, and associated development agreements. Leveraging our technology leadership in AI and building on our long-standing automotive relationships, we are delivering a full solution for the AV market under the DRIVE brand. NVIDIA has demonstrated multiple applications of AI within the car. AI can drive the car itself as a pilot, in either partial or fully autonomous mode. AI can also be a co-pilot, assisting the human driver in creating a safer driving experience.

NVIDIA is working with several hundred partners in the automotive ecosystem including automakers, truck makers, tier-one suppliers, sensor manufacturers, automotive research institutions, HD mapping companies, and startups to develop and deploy AI systems for self-driving vehicles. Our unified AI computing architecture starts with training deep neural networks using our Tesla GPUs, and then running them within the vehicle on the NVIDIA DRIVE computing platform. The platform consists of high-performance, energy efficient hardware - DRIVE AGX, and open, modular software - including DRIVE AV for autonomous driving and DRIVE IX for in-vehicle AI assistance. In addition, we offer a scalable simulation solution, NVIDIA DRIVE Constellation, for testing and validating a self-driving platform before commercial deployment. This end-to-end, software-defined approach allows cars to receive over-the-air updates to add new features and capabilities throughout the life of a vehicle.

NVIDIA DRIVE can perceive and understand in real-time what's happening around the vehicle, precisely locate itself on an HD map, and plan a safe path forward. This advanced self-driving car platform combines deep learning, sensor fusion, and surround vision to change the driving experience. Our DRIVE platform scales from a palm-sized, energy-efficient module for automated highway-driving capabilities to a configuration with multiple systems aimed at enabling driverless cars. Our Xavier SoC, which started shipping in 2018, enables vehicles to use deep neural networks to process data from multiple cameras and sensors. It powers the DRIVE AutoPilot, the first commercially availableNVIDIA’s Level 2+ automated driving system,solution, combining the DRIVE AV self-driving solution with the DRIVE IX cockpit software, including a visualization system for allowing the driver to see what the car sees and plans to do. In fiscal year 2020, we announced our next-generation SoC, Orin, targeting mass production in 2022.

Business Strategies

NVIDIA’s key strategies that shape our overall business approach include:

Sales and Marketing

Backlog

Our sales are primarily made pursuant to standard purchase orders. The quantity of products purchased by our customers as well as our shipment schedules are subject to revisions that reflect changes in both the customers' requirements and in manufacturing availability. Our industry is characterized by relatively short lead time orders and delivery schedules, thus, we believe that only a small portion of our backlog is non-cancelable and that the dollar amount associated with the non-cancelable portion is not significant.

Seasonality

Our GPU and Tegra processor platforms serve many markets from consumer PC gaming to enterprise workstations to government and cloud service provider datacenters,data centers, although a majority of our revenue stems from the consumer industry. Our consumer products have typically seensee stronger revenue in the second half of our fiscal year. In addition, based on the production schedules of key customers, some of our products for notebooks or game consoles typically generate stronger revenue in the second and third quarters, and weaker revenue in the fourth and first quarters. However, there can be no assurance that this trend will continue; for example, in fiscal year 2019 second half revenue was weaker than the first half.continue.

Manufacturing

We do not directly manufacture semiconductors used for our products. Instead, we utilize a fabless manufacturing strategy, whereby we employ world-class suppliers for all phases of the manufacturing process, including wafer fabrication, assembly, testing, and packaging. This strategy uses the expertise of industry-leading suppliers that are certified by the International Organization for Standardization in such areas as fabrication, assembly, quality control and assurance, reliability, and testing. Additionally, we can avoid many of the significant costs and risks associated with owning and operating manufacturing operations. While we may directly procure certain raw materials used in the production of our products, such as substrates and a variety of components, our suppliers are responsible for procurement of the majority of the raw materials used in the production of our products. As a result, we can focus our resources on product design, additional quality assurance, marketing, and customer support.

We utilize industry-leading suppliers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, to produce our semiconductor wafers. We then utilize independent subcontractors, such as Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc., Amkor Technology, BYD Auto Co. Ltd., Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., JSI Logistics Ltd., King Yuan Electronics Co., Ltd., and Siliconware Precision Industries Company Ltd. to perform assembly, testing, and packaging of most of our products and platforms. We purchase substrates from IbidenCo. Ltd., Kinsus Interconnect Technology Corporation, and Unimicron Technology Corporation, and memory from Micron Technology, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., and SK Hynix.

We typically receive semiconductor products from our subcontractors, perform incoming quality assurance and configuration, and then ship the semiconductors to contract equipment manufacturers, or CEMs, distributors, motherboard and AIB customers from our third-party warehouse in Hong Kong. Generally, these manufacturers assemble and test the boards based on our design kit and test specifications, and then ship our products to retailers, system builders, or OEMs as motherboard and AIB solutions.

We also utilize industry-leading contract manufacturers, or CMs, such as BYD and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., and ODMs such as Quanta Computer and Wistron Corporation, to manufacture some of our products for sale directly to end customers. In those cases, key elements such as the GPU, SOCSoC and memory are often consigned by us to the CMs, who are responsible for the procurement of other components used in the production process.

Working Capital

We focus considerable attention on managing our inventories and other working-capital-related items. We manage inventories by communicating with our customers and partners and then using our industry experience to forecast demand on a platform-by-platform basis. We then place manufacturing orders for our products that are based on forecasted demand. We generally maintain substantial inventories of our products because the semiconductor industry is characterized by short lead time orders and quick delivery schedules.products. A substantial amount of our inventories is maintained as semi-finished products that can be leveraged across a wide range of our processors to balance our customer demands.

Competition

The market for our products is intensely competitive and is characterized by rapid technological change and evolving industry standards. We believe that the principal competitive factors in this market are performance, breadth of product offerings, access to customers and partners and distribution channels, software support, conformity to industry standard APIs, manufacturing capabilities, processor pricing, and total system costs. We believe that our ability to remain competitive will depend on how well we are able to anticipate the features and functions that customers and partners will demand and whether we are able to deliver consistent volumes of our products at acceptable levels of quality and at competitive prices. We expect competition to increase from both existing competitors and new market entrants with products that may be less costlylower priced than ours, or may provide better performance or additional features not provided by our products. In addition, it is possible that new competitors or alliances among competitors could emerge and acquire significant market share.

A significant source of competition comes from companies that provide or intend to provide GPUs, embedded SOCs, and other accelerated and AI computing processor products. Some of our competitors may have greater marketing, financial, distribution and manufacturing resources than we do and may be more able to adapt to customer or technological changes.

Patents and Proprietary Rights

We have also licensed technology from third parties for incorporation in some of our products and for defensive reasons, and expect to continue to enter into such license agreements.

Employees

As of January 27, 2019,26, 2020, we had 13,27713,775 employees, 9,4869,823 of whom were engaged in research and development and 3,7913,952 of whom were engaged in sales, marketing, operations, and administrative positions.

Environmental Regulatory Compliance

To date, we have not incurred significant expenses related to environmental regulatory compliance matters.

Available Information

ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS

In evaluating NVIDIA and our business, the following factors should be considered in addition to the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Before you buy our common stock, you should know that making such an investment involves risks including, but not limited to, the risks described below. Any one of the following risks could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations or reputation, which could cause our stock price to decline, and you may lose all or a part of your investment. 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.

Risks Related to Our Business, Industry and Partners

We have created GPU-based visual and accelerated computing platforms that address four large markets: Gaming, Professional Visualization, Datacenter,Data Center, and Automotive. These markets often experience rapid technological change, changes in customer requirements, new product introductions and enhancements, and evolving industry standards. Our success depends on our ability to identify these emerging industry changes and to develop new (or enhance our existing) products, services and technologies that meet the evolving needs of these markets. Such activities may require considerable technical, financial, compliance, sales and marketing investments. We currently devote significant resources to the development of technologies and business offerings in markets where we have a limited operating history, such as the automotive and datacenterdata center markets, which presents additional risks to our business. We must also continue to develop the infrastructure needed to appropriately scale our business in these areas, including customer service and customer support. We also must meet customer safety and compliance standards, which are subject to change. Additionally, we continue to make considerable investments in research and development, which may not produce significant revenue for several years, if at all. If our investments are unsuccessful and we fail to develop new products, services and technologies, or if we focus on technologies that do not become widely adopted, our business, revenue, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected. We cannot assure you that our strategic direction will result in innovative products and technologies that provide value to our customers, partners and ultimately, our shareholders. If we fail to anticipate the changing needs of our target markets and emerging technology trends, or if we do not appropriately adapt that strategy as market conditions evolve, in a timely manner to exploit potential market opportunities, our business will be harmed.

Our target markets remain extremely competitive, and we expect competition to intensify as current competitors expand their product and/or service offerings, industry standards continue to evolve, customer needs change and new competitors enter these markets. Our competitors’ products, services and technologies may be less costly, or may offer superior functionality or better features, than ours, which may result, among other things, in lower than expected selling prices for our products. In addition, some of our competitors operate and maintain their own fabrication facilities, have longer operating histories, larger customer bases, more comprehensive intellectual property, or IP, portfolios and patent protections, and greater financial, sales, marketing and distribution resources than we do. These competitors may be able to more effectively identify and capitalize upon opportunities in new markets and end user customer trends, quickly transition their products, including semiconductor products, to increasingly smaller line width geometries, and obtain sufficient foundry capacity and packaging materials, which could harm our business. If we are unable to successfully compete in our target markets, respond to changes in our target markets or introduce new offerings to meet the needs of this competitive environment, including in significant international markets such as China, demand for our products, services and technologies could decrease, which would cause our revenue to decline and cause our results of operations to suffer. In addition, the competitive landscape in our target markets has changed and may continue to evolve due to a trend toward consolidation, which could lead to fewer customers, partners, or suppliers, any of which could negatively affect our financial results.

Security breaches, computer malware, phishing, and cyber-attacks have become more prevalent and sophisticated in recent years. These threats are constantly evolving, making it increasingly difficult to successfully defend against them or

implement adequate preventative measures. These attacks have occurred on our systems in the past and are expected to occur in the future. Experienced computer programmers, hackers and employees may penetrate our security controls and misappropriate or compromise our confidential information, or that of our employees or third parties. These attacks may

Our products are complex and may contain defects or security vulnerabilities, or experience failures or unsatisfactory performance due to any number of issues in design, fabrication, packaging, materials and/or use within a system. These risks may increase as our products are introduced into new devices, markets, technologies and applications, including into the automotive market, or as new versions are released. Some errors in our products or services may only be discovered after a product or service has been shipped or used by customers or the end users of such product. Undiscovered vulnerabilities in our products or services could expose our customers or end users to hackers or other unscrupulous third parties who develop and deploy viruses, worms and other malicious software programs that could attack our products or services. Failure of our products to perform to specifications, or other product defects, could lead to substantial damage to the products we sell directly to customers, the end product in which our device has been integrated by OEMs, ODMs, AIBs and Tier 1 automotive suppliers, and to the user of such end product. Any such defect may cause us to incur significant warranty, support and repair or replacement costs, write off the value of related inventory, cause us to lose market share, and divert the attention of our engineering personnel from our product development efforts to find and correct the issue. In addition, an error or defect in new products or releases or related software drivers after commencement of commercial shipments could result in failure to achieve market acceptance or loss of design wins, harm our relationships with customers and partners and harm consumers’ perceptions of our brand. Also, we may be required to reimburse our customers, partners or consumers, including costs to repair or replace products in the field. A product recall, including automotive recalls or a recall due to a bug in our products, or a significant number of product returns could be expensive, damage our reputation, harm our ability to attract new customers, result in the shifting of business to our competitors and result in litigation against us, such as product liability suits. If a product liability claim is brought against us, the cost of defending the claim could be significant and would divert the efforts of our technical and management personnel, and harm our business. Further, our business liability insurance may be inadequate or future coverage may be unavailable on acceptable terms, which could adversely impact our financial results.

Our worldwide operations could be disrupted by earthquakes, telecommunications failures, power or water shortages, outages at cloud service providers, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, fires, extreme weather conditions, cyber-attacks, terrorist attacks, medical epidemics or pandemics and other natural or man-made disasters, catastrophic events or climate change. The occurrence of any of these disruptions could harm our business and result in significant losses, a decline in revenue and an increase in our costs and expenses. Any of these business disruptions could require substantial expenditures and recovery time in order to fully resume operations. Our corporate headquarters, 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, near major earthquake faults known for seismic activity. In addition, a large portion of our current datacenterdata center capacity is located in California, making our operations vulnerable to natural disasters or other business disruptions occurring in these geographical areas. The manufacture of product components, the final assembly of our products and other critical operations are concentrated in certain geographic locations, including Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Korea. Additionally, a significant portion of our finished goods product distribution occurs through Hong Kong. Geopolitical change or changes in government regulations and policies in the United States or abroad also may result in changing regulatory requirements, trade policies, import duties and economic disruptions that could impact our operating strategies, product demand, access to global markets, hiring, and profitability. In particular, revisions to laws or regulations or their

interpretation and enforcement could result in increased taxation, trade sanctions, the imposition of 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. For example, regulations to implement the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 could have an adverse effect on our business plans. 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. Our operations

We manufacture our GPUs and Tegra processors based on estimates of customer demand and requirements. We sell many of our products through a channel model, and our channel customers sell to retailers, distributors, and/or end customers. As a result, the decisions made by our channel partners, retailers, and distributors in response to changing market conditions and the changing demand for our products could impact our financial results. In order to have shorter shipment lead times and quicker delivery schedules for our customers, we may build inventories for anticipated periods of growth which do not occur, may build inventory anticipating demand that does not materialize, or may build inventory to serve what we believe is pent-up demand. Such decisions may and have resulted in prolonged channel sell-through, as we experienced with our mid-range gaming GPUs in fiscal year 2019. In estimating demand, we make multiple assumptions, any of which may prove to be incorrect. Situations that may result in excess or obsolete inventory include:

The cancellation or deferral of customer purchase orders could result in our holding excess inventory, which could adversely affect our gross margins. In addition, because we often sell a substantial portion of our products in the last month of each quarter, we may not be able to reduce our inventory purchase commitments in a timely manner in response to customer cancellations or deferrals. We could be required to write-down our inventory to the lower of cost or market or write-off excess inventory, and we could experience a reduction in average selling prices if we incorrectly forecast product demand, any of which could harm our financial results.

Conversely, if we underestimate our customers' 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 customers' orders on a timely basis. We may also face supply constraints caused by natural disasters or other events. In such cases, 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. 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 damaged.

We conduct our business worldwide and we have offices in various countries outside of the United States. Our semiconductor wafers are manufactured, assembled, tested and packaged by third parties located outside of the United States. We also generate a significant portion of our revenue from sales outside the United States. We allocate revenue to individual countries based on the location to which the products are initially billed even if our customers’ revenue is attributable to end customers that are located in a different location. Revenue from sales outside of the United States accounted for 87%92% of total revenue for fiscal year 2020, and 87% for each of fiscal years 2019 2018, and 2017.2018. Revenue from billings to China, including Hong Kong, was 24%25% of our revenue for fiscal year 2019,2020, even if our customers' revenue is attributable to end customers that are located in a different location. Additionally, as of January 27, 2019,26, 2020, approximately 46% of our employees were located outside of the United States. The global nature of our business subjects us to a number of risks and uncertainties, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations, including:

Risks Related to Regulatory, Legal, Our Common Stock and Other Matters

We have in the past, currently are, and may in the future become involved in lawsuits or other legal proceedings alleging patent infringement or other intellectual property rights violations by us, our employees or parties that we have agreed to indemnify for certain claims of infringement. An unfavorable ruling in any such intellectual property related litigation could include significant damages, invalidation of a patent or family of patents, indemnification of customers, payment of lost profits, or, when it has been sought, injunctive relief. Claims that our products or processes infringe the IP rights of others, regardless of their merit, could cause us to incur significant costs to respond to, defend, and resolve such claims, and they may also divert the efforts and attention of management and technical personnel.

We may commence litigation or other legal proceedings in order to protect our intellectual property rights. Such proceedings may increase our operating expenses, which could negatively impact our operating results. Further, we could be subject to countersuits as a result of our initiation of litigation. If infringement claims are made against us or our products are found to infringe a third party’s patent or intellectual property, we or one of our indemnitees may have to seek a license to the third party’s patent or other intellectual property rights. However, we may not be able to obtain licenses at all or on terms acceptable to us particularly from our competitors. If we or one of our indemnitees is unable to obtain a license from

a third party for technology that we use or that is used in one of our products, we could be subject to substantial liabilities or have to suspend or discontinue the manufacture and sale of one or more of our products. We may also have to make royalty or other payments, or cross license our technology. If these arrangements are not concluded on commercially reasonable terms, our business could be negatively impacted. Furthermore, the indemnification of a customer or other indemnitee may increase our operating expenses which could negatively impact our operating results.

Our success depends in part on protecting our intellectual property. To accomplish this, we rely primarily on a combination of patents, trademarks, trade secrets, employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements, licensing arrangements, and the laws of the countries in which we operate to protect our intellectual property in the United States and internationally. We may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights, and even with significant expenditures we may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights that are valuable to our business. The laws of certain foreign countries may not protect our products or intellectual property rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. This makes the possibility of piracy of our technology and products more likely. In addition, the theft or unauthorized use or publication of our trade secrets and other confidential business information could harm our competitive position and reduce acceptance of our products; as a result, the value of our investment in research and development, product development, and marketing could be reduced. We continuously assess whether and where to seek formal protection for existing and new innovations and technologies, but cannot be certain whether our applications for such protections will be approved, and, if approved, whether we will be able to enforce such protections.

Our operating results have in the past fluctuated and may in the future continue to fluctuate due to numerous factors. Therefore, investors should not rely on quarterly comparisons of our results of operations as an indication of our future performance.

Our products and services may provide us with access to sensitive, confidential or personal data or information that is subject to privacy and security laws and regulations. Concerns about our practices with regard to the collection, use, retention, security or disclosure of personal information or other privacy-related matters, even if unfounded, could damage our reputation and adversely affect our operating results. The theft, loss, or misuse of personal data collected, used, stored, or transferred by us to run our business or by one of our partners could result in significantly increased security costs, damage to our reputation, regulatory proceedings, disruption of our business activities or increased costs related to defending legal claims.

Worldwide regulatory authorities are considering and have approved various legislative proposals concerning data protection, which continue to evolve and apply to our business. For example, the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which requires companies to meet new requirements beginning ineffective as of May 2018 regarding the handling of personal data, including its use, protection and the ability of persons whose data is stored to correct or delete such data about themselves. Failure to meet GDPR requirements could result in penalties of up to 4% of worldwide revenue. In addition, the interpretation and application of consumer and data protection laws in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are often uncertain and fluid, and may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our data practices. If so, we may be ordered to change our data practices and/or be fined. Complying with these changing laws has caused, and could continue to cause, us to incur substantial costs, which could have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations. Further, failure to comply with existing or new rules may result in significant penalties or orders to stop the alleged noncompliant activity.

As a multinational corporation, we are subject to income taxes as well as non-income based taxes, such as payroll, sales, use, value-added, net worth, property and goods and services taxes, in both the United States and various foreign jurisdictions. Our domestic and international tax liabilities are subject to the allocation of revenue and expenses in different jurisdictions. Significant judgment is required in determining our worldwide provision for income taxes and other tax liabilities. Further, changes in United States federal, and state or international tax laws applicable to multinational corporations or other fundamental law changes may materially impact our tax expense and cash flows, as we experienced in fiscal year 2018 with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA.

Our future effective tax rate may be affected by such factors as changes in tax laws, changes in our business or statutory rates, changes in jurisdictions in which our profits are determined to be earned and taxed, changes in available tax credits, the resolution of issues arising from tax audits, changes in United States generally accepted accounting principles, adjustments to income taxes upon finalization of tax returns, increases in expenses not deductible for tax purposes, changes in the valuation of our deferred tax assets and liabilities and in deferred tax valuation allowances, changing interpretation of existing laws or regulations, the impact of accounting for stock-based compensation and the recognition of excess tax benefits and tax deficiencies within the income tax provision in the period in which they occur, the impact of accounting for business combinations, shifts in the amount of earnings in the United States compared with other regions in the world and overall levels of income before tax, changes in our international organization, as well as the expiration of statute of limitations and settlements of audits. Any changes in our effective tax rate may reduce our net income.

We currently and may in the future face legal, administrative and regulatory proceedings, claims, demands and/or investigations involving shareholder, consumer, competition and/or other issues relating to our business on a global basis. For example, multiple securities litigation claims have recently been filed against us and certain of our officers based on the dissemination of allegedly false and misleading statements related to channel inventory and the impact of cryptocurrency mining on GPU demand. In addition, a stockholder, purporting to act on behalf of the Company, filed a derivative lawsuit seeking to assert claims on behalf of the Company against the members of our board of directors and certain officers based on the dissemination of allegedly false and misleading statements related to channel inventory and the impact of cryptocurrency mining on GPU demand.

Litigation and regulatory proceedings are inherently uncertain, and adverse rulings could occur, including monetary damages, or an injunction stopping us from manufacturing or selling certain products, engaging in certain business practices, or requiring other remedies, such as compulsory licensing of patents. An unfavorable outcome or settlement may result in a material adverse impact on our business, results of operations, financial position, and overall trends. In addition, regardless of the outcome, litigation can be costly, time-consuming, and disruptive to our operations.

In addition, the laws and regulations our business is subject to are complex and change frequently. We may be required to incur significant expense to comply with changes in, or remedy violations of, these laws and regulations.

On March 5, 2000, we entered into an agreement with Microsoft in which we agreed to develop and sell graphics chips and to license certain technology to Microsoft and its licensees for use in the Xbox. Under the agreement, if an individual or corporation makes an offer to purchase shares equal to or greater than 30% of the outstanding shares of our common stock, Microsoft may have first and last rights of refusal to purchase the stock. The Microsoft provision and the other factors listed above could also delay or prevent a change in control of NVIDIA. These provisions could also discourage proxy contests and make it more difficult for shareholders to elect directors of their choosing and to cause us to take other corporate actions they desire.

ITEM 1B. UNRESOLVED STAFF COMMENTS

Not applicable.

ITEM 2. PROPERTIES

Outside of Santa Clara, California, we lease facilities in Austin, Texas and a number of regional facilities in other U.S. locations that are used as research and development centers and/or sales and administrative offices. Outside of the United States, we own a building in Hyderabad, India, that is being used primarily as a research and development center. We also lease facilities in various international locations that are used as research and development centers and/or sales and

ITEM 3. LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

Please see Note 1213 of the Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in Part IV, Item 15 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of our legal proceedings.

ITEM 4. MINE SAFETY DISCLOSURES

Not Applicable.

PART II

ITEM 5. MARKET FOR REGISTRANT’S COMMON EQUITY, RELATED STOCKHOLDER MATTERS AND ISSUER PURCHASES OF EQUITY SECURITIES

Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Beginning August 2004, our Board of Directors authorized us to repurchase our stock.

Since the inception of our share repurchase program, we have repurchased an aggregate of 260 million shares for a total cost of $7.08 billion through January 27, 2019.26, 2020. All shares delivered from these repurchases have been placed into treasury stock.

In November 2018, the Board authorized an additional $7.00 billion under our share repurchase program and extended it through the end of December 2022. As of January 27, 2019,26, 2020, we wereare authorized, subject to certain specifications, to repurchase additional shares of our common stock up to $7.24 billion.

The repurchases can be made in the open market, in privately negotiated transactions, or in structured share repurchase programs, and can be made in one or more larger repurchases, in compliance with Rule 10b-18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, subject to market conditions, applicable legal requirements, and other factors. The program does not obligate NVIDIA to acquire any particular amount of common stock and the program may be suspended at any time at our discretion.

We also withhold common stock shares associated with net share settlements to cover tax withholding obligations upon the vesting of restricted stock unit awards under our employee equity incentive program. During fiscal year 2019,2020, we withheld approximately 43 million shares at a total cost of $1.03 billion$551 million through net share settlements. Refer to Note 34 of the Notes to the Consolidated Financial Statements in Part IV, Item 15 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for further discussion regarding our equity incentive plans.

Stock Performance Graphs 

The following graph compares the cumulative total shareholder return for our common stock, the S&P 500 Index, and the Nasdaq 100 Index for the five years ended January 27, 2019.26, 2020. The graph assumes that $100 was invested on January 26, 201425, 2015 in our common stock and in each of the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq 100 Index. Our common stock is a component of each of the presented indices. Total return assumes reinvestment of dividends in each of the indices indicated. Total return is based on historical results and is not intended to indicate future performance.