Nvidia Announces New Chips Designed Just for Bitcoin Mining
The new custom crypto mining chips won’t work for gamers
Though the company doesn’t often acknowledge it, for the last three years, Nvidia’s business has been inextricably linked to the unpredictable price of bitcoin. That’s because bitcoin miners realized that Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) were perfect for the mathematical calculations required to mine cryptocurrency and quickly started buying out whatever stock they could.
When bitcoin boomed in 2017, Nvidia’s consumer and datacenter GPU business did too. When 2017’s crypto bubble burst, Nvidia was left holding the bag (or the GPUs, as it were). In 2018, Nvidia reported that a shrinking demand for cryptocurrency mining GPUs left the company with a glut of unsold inventory. Nvidia stock plummeted 15%.
Now with bitcoin at an all-time high, Nvidia’s latest GPUs have been sold out since their release in September. Some of that could be gamers looking for the latest hardware while stuck at home during a pandemic coupled with supply chain constraints. But it would be naive to overlook bitcoin’s impact.
To address the dearth in supply — and capitalize on the current crypto moment — Nvidia is doing something new: Make some of its gaming GPUs worse for crypto mining while…
