Nvidia Hedges Against Crypto Hangover With Chips Just for Miners
- Graphics card maker seeks to avoid boom-and-bust coin cycle
- High-flying stock was hammered in 2018 when miners retreated
Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has had some capabilities deliberately stripped out in order to remain the exclusive preserve of its core gamer customer base.
Source: Nvidia Corp.
Nvidia Corp. has an unlikely message for some of its most voracious customers: please don’t buy our latest high-end computer-graphics chip.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, a $1,199 graphics card, and the RTX 3070 Ti, which costs about half that amount, have had some of their capabilities deliberately stripped out. Nvidia wants them to be the exclusive preserve of its core gamer customer base and is nixing the products’ ability to effectively mine cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin, seeking to discourage miners from snapping up all the supply to build massive crypto-processing farms. Instead, Nvidia is pushing a chip just for the miners.
Nvidia’s extreme action is one result of the rising influence of cryptocurrencies, touching on the retail market, the environment and the worlds of finance and technology. Virtual currencies have been in the news as the preferred ransom payment method of cyber attackers. Elon Musk tweets about them more often than he does about his carmaker, Tesla Inc. And as they attract new investors and participants daily, cryptocurrencies have grown more unpredictable and hungrier for the hardware used to generate them.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive officer, is swimming against this crypto tide. His company needs to avoid a repeat of the 2017 run-up in demand for its graphics chips, which are the most efficient off-the-shelf chips for solving math problems to create the codes that are the basis of cryptocurrencies.