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Nvidia’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kagan, has expressed a unfavorable view on cryptocurrencies, stating that they don’t “bring anything useful for society,” whereas “AI does.”
Crypto isn’t ‘useful for society’
According to Kagan, AI purposes such because the chatbot ChatGPT have extra worth than mining crypto. Kagan’s feedback are usually not too shocking on condition that Nvidia has a historical past of distancing itself from the crypto group, comparable to limiting the power of its graphics playing cards to mine Ethereum in 2021.
Kagan doubled down on his anti-crypto stance, stating that he has by no means believed in blockchain know-how.
“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity.”
Nvidia’s current crypto previous
However, Nvidia’s success in the inventory market over the previous two years does appear to have a correlation to the crypto trade. In 2021, prior to The Merge, Nvidia launched a graphics chip (CMP) that was optimized for Ethereum mining whereas limiting gaming-focused graphics playing cards. However, the chips failed to impress as sales have been ‘nominal’ and collapsed 77% in the third quarter of 2022.
In addition, Nvidia was fined $5.5 million in May 2022 by the SEC for failing to disclose the variety of GPUs offered for mining. The SEC alleged that Nvidia knew the playing cards have been getting used for mining however failed to reveal the data, which, they stated, misled traders concerning the expansion of the enterprise. Given that almost all of Nvidia playing cards have been used to mine Ethereum, which moved to proof-of-stake on the finish of 2022, it’s a honest criticism as demand for playing cards dissipated post-Merge.
Leading up to the Ethereum Merge, which befell on Sept. 15, 2022, income for Nvidia gaming GPUs (which largely nonetheless labored for crypto mining following group workarounds) fell to $1.57 billion, down from $3.2 billion the yr prior. Thus, as demand for Ethereum miners fell, so did Nvidia’s sales. In reality, if you happen to have a look at the Nvidia share worth relative to the worth of Ethereum, each reached all-time highs inside every week of one another earlier than declining considerably.
Interestingly, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, additionally stated again in 2017 that “cryptocurrency and blockchain are here to stay. The market need for it is going to grow, and over time it will become quite large.”
It seems that now Ethereum has moved to proof-of-stake, and its CMP chips failed to take off; the corporate has all however fully turned its again on crypto, in line with Kagan’s statements. The firm’s focus is on AI analysis and gaming, with main shoppers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle buying over 36,000 of Nvidia’s AI-focused processors.