Nvidia ended the 2021 fiscal year on a stellar note that saw the chipmaker’s fourth-quarter earnings crest $5 billion, up 61% year over year.

The chipmaker continued to see strong demand for its Ampere-based GPUs, both in the consumer and data center spaces during the quarter, which helped to boost the company’s revenues to record levels, CFO Colette Kress noted on an investor call Wednesday.

Gaming has traditionally been Nvidia’s core competency and revenue driver, and Q4 was no different. Strong demand for Nvidia’s 3000-series GPUs over the holiday season exceeded expectations and accounted for roughly half the chipmaker’s earnings during the quarter.

Kress noted that ongoing supply chain shortages, coupled with this high demand continue to impact the availability of products across the board.

And while gaming remains a major focus for the GPU maker, the company has taken steps to expand its portfolio into data center compute, networking, and, if the proposed acquisition of Arm Holdings receives regulatory approval, eventually CPUs.

To this end, the chipmaker’s data center offerings — which included the Nvidia A100 GPUs but not Mellanox networking products — grew to $1.9 billion, up 97% year over year.

“The A100 has been adopted by all major cloud customers for internal workloads,” boasted Kress, adding that the ramp of the GPU has proven “smoother” than the previous generation of Volta-based data center GPUs. “Full year data center revenue rose 125% to a record $6.7 billion, including almost 70% growth from data center compute,” Kress said.

SmartNIC vendor Mellanox, which the company acquired in March 2019 and closed on a year later, also saw strong gains during the fourth quarter, up 30% year over year compared to fiscal year 2020. However, Nvidia didn’t break out Mellanox revenues specifically as it was still a standalone company as of Q4 of fiscal year 2020.

But while Mellanox saw strong year-over-year growth in Q4, sequential revenues were dinged by non-reoccurring sales to an original equipment manufacturer in China in the third quarter.

Kress said he believes Mellanox will return to sequential revenues in the first quarter, “driven by strong demand for high-speed networking products including the ramp of ConnectX adapters.”

Finally, Kress provided investors with an update on the company’s proposed $40 billion acquisition of British chip designer Arm Holdings from SoftBank.

The deal has been subject to intense scrutiny and growing concern from competing chipmakers in recent months.

Despite these challenges, Kress told investors she was confident Nvidia would receive necessary regulatory approval within the 18-month window quoted at the time of the announcement.

“The process is moving forward as expected,” she said. “We are in constructive dialogue with the relevant authorities and are confident that regulators will see the benefits to the entire tech ecosystem.”

From the get-go, Nvidia has been clear it intends to preserve Arm’s customer neutrality, and the company itself would remain headquartered in Cambridge, England.

The fourth quarter was a bright one for Nvidia. The company saw robust revenue growth both sequentially and year over year. Meanwhile, net income grew 53% year over year to $1.4 billion.

Full year, Nvidia’s revenues topped $16.7 billion up 53% from fiscal 2020, while net incomes grew by a similar margin up 55% to $4.33 billion during the same period.

Looking to fiscal year 2022, the chipmaker is projecting $5.3 billion in revenues for the first quarter, with most sequential growth being driven by gaming revenues.