Nvidia says crypto 'doesn't bring anything useful for society' as it turns its focus to artificial intelligence
Rick Wilking/Reuters
- Nvidia says crypto hasn't produced anything useful for the world as it shifts focus to AI.
- Crypto miners feverishly bought GPUs from Nvidia amid the crypto boom, but those businesses have fizzled.
- "They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn't bring anything useful for society," Nvidia's CTO said.
Nvidia is looking beyond crypto as it shifts its focus to artificial intelligence, according to a recent interview with Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan.
Crypto miners feverishly bought GPUs from Nvidia during the crypto boom of 2020 and 2021, helping power solid growth in Nvidia's underlying business.
But that business has since fizzled amid the ongoing collapse in cryptocurrency prices, which made it less profitable for miners to run their operations, leading to less GPU sales to crypto mining businesses.
Kagan wasn't surprised by the flop in crypto, telling The Guardian that there has yet to be any real-world usability case coming from the crypto industry aside from speculating on 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 eventually it collapsed, because it doesn't bring anything useful for society," Kagan said.
That's not the case for artificial intelligence, which has been front and center following the release of ChatGPT. That chatbot was trained on a supercomputer made up of about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. And ChatGPT is seeing some real world use cases.
"With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his 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 browser on their desktop. The Nvidia DGX Cloud will be used by cloud heavyweight companies like Microsoft's Azure platform and Alphabet's Google Cloud, among others.
And that business should more than fill up the hole left by the crypto miners that deserted its business amid falling bitcoin and ethereum prices.
"I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don't redirect the company to support whatever it is," Kagan said.