Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reacts to video of his keynote address at CES in Las Vegas Rick Wilking/Reuters Nvidia says crypto has brought nothing useful to the world as it shifts focus to AI. Crypto miners feverishly bought GPUs from Nvidia amid the crypto boom, but those companies have fizzled.
According to a recent interview with Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan, Nvidia is looking beyond crypto and shifting its focus to artificial intelligence.
Crypto miners feverishly bought GPUs from Nvidia during the crypto boom of 2020 and 2021, contributing to solid growth of Nvidia’s underlying business.
But that business has since fizzled amid the ongoing slump in cryptocurrency prices, making it less profitable for miners to run their operations, resulting in fewer GPU sales to crypto mining companies.
Kagan wasn’t surprised by the crypto flop, telling The Guardian that there isn’t a real usability case from the crypto industry yet, aside from speculation about risky assets.
“All this crypto stuff needed parallel processing and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it for that purpose. They bought a lot of stuff and then it finally collapsed because it doesn’t bring anything useful to society,” Kagan said.
That is not the case with the artificial intelligence that came to the fore after the release of ChatGPT. This chatbot was trained on a supercomputer consisting of around 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. And ChatGPT sees some real-world use cases.
“Now with ChatGPT anyone can create their own machine, their own program, you just tell it what to do and it will do it,” Kagan said.
Nvidia has made a big move into the artificial intelligence space, with the company recently unveiling a cloud-based AI supercomputer that users can access via a browser on their desktop. The Nvidia DGX Cloud is used by cloud heavyweight companies such as Microsoft’s Azure platform and Alphabet’s Google Cloud, among others.
And this deal should do more than fill the hole left by crypto miners who left their businesses 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’re not redirecting the company to support whatever it is,” Kagan said.
WATCH NOW: Insider Inc.’s Popular Videos
Loading…
