NVIDIA reportedly slows down hiring as it braces for a drop in gaming sales
It follows similar moves from Lyft, Snap, Meta and others.
A slowing economy continues to affect the tech industry, as NVIDIA has become one of the first chipmakers to announce a pullback on new hiring, according to memos seen by The New Indian Express and confirmed by Protocol. That lines up its comments during its latest earnings release, when it said that it expects sales of GPUs for gaming consoles and PCs to decline in the current quarter. "Overall the gaming market is slowing," CEO Jensen Huang told Reuters.
NVIDIA actually had a solid previous quarter, with revenue up 46 percent over last year to $8.29 billion. It also noted that its "gearing up for the largest wave of new products in our history" with new GPU, CPU, DPU and robotics processors coming online in the second half of the year.
However, it forecast lower revenue than the market expected for next quarter. And internally, the company appears to be bracing for a slowdown. "Onsite interviews... continue, but we will raise our standard to the highest levels," it reportedly said in a Slack message. "We were told that leadership wants to take a pause to onboard the thousands of new hires we've recently made." The company also told Protocol that it's slowing hiring "to focus our budget on taking care of existing employees as inflation persists.
NVIDIA will be joining a number of tech companies, including Lyft, Uber and Snap, in announcing hiring slowdowns. Tech companies have been hit particularly hard by economic headwinds cause by COVID lockdowns in China and the war in Ukraine. NVIDIA, however, was expected to weather events due to continued strong demand in the GPU market that has kept prices high and supply short.
