NVIDIA puts an end to cryptocurrency mining

Recently, the hype around cryptocurrencies has greatly subsided – even NVIDIA, which previously released special video cards for mining, drew attention to this. The company believes that this direction does not bring anything useful to humanity, unlike artificial intelligence technologies.

An unexpected statement was made by NVIDIA CTO Michael Kagan in an interview with The Guardian. According to him, everything related to cryptocurrencies needed parallel processing, where NVIDIA performs better than others, so the company was forced to respond to demand from users. They bought a lot of equipment, but in the end it all collapsed, and did not bring any benefit to society.

“I never believed that this is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff and you sell them stuff,” said Michael Kagan. 

According to him, there are more rational ways to use graphics accelerators and their computing power, like artificial intelligence and ChatGPT. By the way, at the recent GTC 2023 exhibition, the head of NVIDIA announced that he personally delivered the first supercomputer in OpenAPI to power ChatGPT servers.