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Nvidia says cryptocurrency is helping drive GPU demand

Nvidia says cryptocurrency is helping drive GPU demand

The chief financial officer at hardware firm Nvidia has highlighted how the use of its GPUs for cryptocurrency mining has boosted sales.

In the company’s earning call last night, Colette Kress said that cryptocurrency mining helped OEM revenue reach $251m, due to Nvidia providing crypocurrency-specific GPUs.

“GPU sales were lifted by demand from increasingly mining activity, or Ethereum,” Kress said, via the good folks at Seeking Alpha.

“We serve a large portion of this specialised market with a dedicated board, as seen in our OEM sales, and some with GeForce GTX boards. Our strategy is to stay alert to this fast-changing market, knowing that GPUs are highly efficient at running the algorithms used to mine cryptocurrencies.”

The sale of GPUs for the purpose of cryptocurrency mining was a factor in the stock prices of both AMD and Nvidia skyrocketing in June of this year, until analysts pointed out that this was a bubble.

Furthermore, games revenue at Nvidia rose 52 per cent year-on-year to $1.19bn.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.