Nvidia confirms: Crypto miners are not to blame for RTX-30 series price explosion

Nvidia’s vice president confirms crypto demand is currently low, but the door remains open for dedicated mining cards.

Major graphics card maker Nvidia has confirmed that the supply shortages and subsequent price explosion of the RTX-30 series is only due to demand from gamers, and not crypto miners.

Colette Kress, the vice-president of Nvidia, admits in this context that her company is not good at surveying how high the demand from crypto-miners really is, but is Golden Profit nonetheless convinced that it does not account for a significant share.

That the crypto community nevertheless has a use for the manufacturer’s products was recently demonstrated by a private miner who built a mining rig out of 78 Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics cards. This construction is supposed to be able to mine Ether (ETH) worth 128,000 US dollars in the course of a year.

A lucrative business, which is why Kress is keeping the door open for crypto miners

Should the demand from this sector noticeably increase again, this would be a good opportunity to revive the CMP series. These are graphics cards that Nvidia has tailored specifically for crypto-mining, which is why components that are irrelevant for this purpose are dispensed with here.

As Seeking Alpha reports, Kress had made the relevant remarks on 12 January at the J.P. Morgan Tech/Auto Forum Conference. Thus, she said:

„If crypto demand increases significantly, it would be a good opportunity to revive the CMP series and serve the demand created over it.“

However, she sees most of the demand coming from the gaming sector in the future as well, as recently the hunger of gamers alone would have overwhelmed the company’s own production capacity.

Kress sees the usability for cryptocurrencies simply in the fact that Nvidia’s graphics cards are programmable, which has helped the company tap into new market segments in the past:

„Yes, cryptocurrencies are interesting. As you know, our graphics cards have been programmable for many, many years, which means that new areas of application are always being found for them. That has also expanded our demand in recent years. Crypto-mining is one of those application areas.“

According to Kress, Nvidia’s production capacity will remain constrained until at least the beginning of the second quarter, which is why sales will also stagnate during this period.