AMD CEO Claims Declining GPU Sales To Cryptocurrency Miners ‘Healthy’
Over the past year, GPU manufacturers Nvidia and AMD both enjoyed significant sales, somewhat as a result of miners who buy GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies. Yet those sales are presently dropping.
As the value of cryptocurrencies rose in 2017, the demand for GPUs also rose. However, following the market cap peaks of $830 Billion, the market collapsed and the half of its value now. The demand for mining has declined and it is not as attractive as it was a few months back when cryptocurrency prices spiked.
For the first quarter of 2018, AMD recorded revenue of $1.65 Billion and stated 10% of that was from GPU sales to miners. On the other hand, Nvidia recorded revenue of $3.21 billion, and $289 million and claimed that 9%| of that was from sales to miners.
Regardless that both companies have had significant sales in the cryptocurrency industry, they are not eager to expand on it. The companies want their GPUs to be under the control of consumers for gaming and research purposes instead of miners.
CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang noted:
“The reason why they bought [GPU cards] is for gaming, but while they are not gaming; while they are at school, at work, or in bed — they will turn it on and do a little mining. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
The companies presume their revenue from miners in the coming months will decline, but that is not as a result of the cryptocurrency market declining.
Last month the largest application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner-manufacturer, Bitmain revealed miners for Ethereum. Ethereum is the leading cryptocurrency mined on GPUs, and once the Antminer E3 is launched, it might leave the previous GPU miners useless.
However, Bitmain is recovering prior to the Antminer E3 announcement. In 2017 Nvidia reported profits of $3 Billion, which includes all their products such a cloud computing and AI chip.
Lisa Su, AMD CEO is confident on blockchain and believes it’s here to stay. She presumes the mining-related demand for GPUs to decline by two-thirds in the second quarter. Yet, she is not concerned about the decline in sales and refers to it as “healthy” for the company.
Speaking of the crypto-related demand for GPUs, she said:
“I do think the blockchain infrastructure is here to stay. I think there are numerous currencies. There are numerous applications that are using the blockchain technology. We don’t see a significant risk of secondhand GPUs coming into the market. I think what you find is that one, there are numbers of different currencies, and, two, a lot of these users that are buying GPUs these days are actually buying them for multiple use cases, both commercial and consumer.”
Both companies agree on the fact that cryptocurrencies and blockchain are not going away. They have accepted these new technologies, but they are not worried if the revenue from these sales declines in the future.
