Nvidia says Crypto ‘provides nothing useful to society’ amid AI focus

• Nvidia says crypto hasn’t produced anything useful for the world as it shifts focus to AI.
• Crypto miners frantically bought GPUs from Nvidia amid the crypto boom, but those businesses have failed.
• “They bought a lot of stuff, and then it eventually collapsed, because it doesn’t add anything useful to society,” Nvidia’s CTO said.

Nvidia is looking beyond crypto as it shifts focus to artificial intelligence, according to a recent interview with Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan.

Crypto miners frantically bought GPUs from Nvidia during the crypto boom of 2020 and 2021, contributing to solid growth in Nvidia’s underlying business.

But that business has since fizzled amid the ongoing collapse in cryptocurrency prices, making it less profitable for miners to run their business, leading to fewer GPU sales to cryptominers.

Kagan was not surprised by the flop in crypto, telling The Guardian that there has yet to be any real utility case from the crypto industry aside from speculating in risky assets.

“All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then it eventually collapses, because it doesn’t do anything useful for society,” Kagan said.

That is not the case for artificial intelligence, which has taken center stage since the release of ChatGPT. The chatbot was trained on a supercomputer consisting of around 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. And ChatGPT sees some real-world use cases.

“With ChatGPT, anyone can now create their own machine, their own program, you just tell it what to do and it will,” Kagan said.

Nvidia has jumped heavily into the artificial intelligence space, with the company recently unveiling a cloud-based AI supercomputer that users can access from a desktop browser. Nvidia DGX Cloud will be used by cloud heavyweights such as Microsoft’s Azure platform and Alphabet’s Google Cloud, among others.

And that business should more than fill the gap left by the crypto miners who left their businesses amid falling bitcoin and ethereum prices.

“I never thought so [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. 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, Kagan said.