Nvidia wants people to stop using their GPUs to mine worthless crypto

“They bought a lot of stuff, and then it finally collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful to society.”

Good for society

Nvidia, the graphics card giant whose sophisticated GPUs have found a strange new use for mining cryptocurrency, has had enough.

It is asking its customers to stop mining crypto – and do something more worthwhile with their time.

The company’s chief technology officer Michael Kagan said recently Guardian that he wished buyers would turn their attention to artificial intelligence instead.

“All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose,” he told the newspaper. “They bought a lot of things, and then it finally collapsed, because it doesn’t provide anything useful to society. AI does it.”

“I never thought so [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity,” he added. “You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell it. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.”

Proceeding

Kagan’s comments aren’t exactly surprising — the fact that the company is still actively selling GPUs advertised as crypto mining cards, despite, of course. The crypto industry has been put through all of 2022, with the value of mainstream cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin losing over half of its value.

Meanwhile, crypto miners have had to change tack, suddenly faced with an extremely expensive pile of largely worthless mining hardware. Major crypto lenders are selling mining rigs for millions of dollars as they look for the next big thing.

And Nvidia sees a new opportunity on the horizon with AI, a technology that has caught on like wildfire with investors.

“With ChatGPT, anyone can now create their own machine, their own program: you just tell it what to do and it will,” Kagan said Guardian. “And if it doesn’t work the way you want, you tell it ‘I want something else’.”

The appetite is certainly there, with AI already becoming a cash cow for the chipmaker.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it had purchased tens of thousands of A100 GPUs, chips designed from the ground up with AI processing in mind. Amazon and Oracle have also bought similar offerings from Nvidia.

Of course, all of this is assuming that crypto’s moderate rally over the past month doesn’t continue, breathing new life into the mining industry.

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