It is through Michael Kagan, its chief technology officer, that Nvidia confirms its complete disinterest in cryptomining. The company now wants to focus on solutions for AI.
An Nvidia spokesperson told The Guardian: “All of this crypto stuff needed parallel processing, and we are the best [dans ce domaine], so people programmed our GPUs to use them for this purpose. They bought a lot of them and then it all fell apart, because it does nothing for society “. The message is clear, for the Californian founder, cryptos are a thing of the past.
Nvidia has benefited a lot from the cryptomining craze. There was indeed a time when it was impossible to find its most efficient “general public” graphics cards as they were popular with Bitcoin miners, to the chagrin of “simple” gamers. If Nvidia publicly defended itself from supporting this market, sometimes limiting the capacities of its components in a software way, it nevertheless released several GPUs dedicated to this discipline. An example of this is the Nvidia CMP 170HX, once considered the best graphics card for mining Ethereum.
Nvidia now directs its resources to AI and says goodbye to cryptomining
Before 2022, theusing multiple graphics cards to solve math equations complex and validating transactions on the blockchain was one of the cogs of the system. Since then, the landscape has changed. On the one hand, with the adoption of a less energy-consuming consensus algorithm, the Proof of stake, and on the other hand, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.
At a conference held last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced his company’s new direction. According to him, Generative AI will “reinvent nearly every industry”. His company is already reaping the benefits of the current enthusiasm for these new technologies. Silicon Valley giants such as Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon are already buying tens of thousands of new AI chips, the Nvidia A100s and other H100s.
Source : The Guardian
