Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, one of the biggest manufacturers of graphics processing units (GPU) in the world, believes the cryptocurrencies are real and the world has to adapt to them.
This statement comes after the company made higher profit than expected in the fourth quarter of last year. A growing demand for video cards coming from the cryptocurrency miners created a shortage on the market, which made the prices go up.
Huang said: “This year the world will start making peace with the existence of the cryptocurrencies. Based on the blockchain technology, they are highly secure and economic. I believe they have a real purpose. It is a real phenomenon and therefore the world is getting used to them. I am not against the concept of virtual currencies, it is as real as the virtual goods and videogames.”
Colette Kress, the Executive Vice President of NVIDIA, said the high demand for graphic cards on the cryptocurrency market surpassed all expectations and the revenue in the last quarter of 2017 is higher than the revenue in the last quarter of the year before, but she also added it was difficult to quantify this amount. Anyway, NVIDIA assures this amount is smaller compared to other sectors.
Nevertheless, Kress says the company will maintain the focus on its initial market, due to the high volatility of the cryptocurrency market. Moreover, NVIDIA informs the gamers are frustrated with the shortage of video cards and their exorbitant prices, caused by the increasing demand coming from the cryptocurrency miners.
The CEO of NVIDIA said the retailers were responsible for the prices during the shortage and made it clear the company asked them to focus on the gamers and not on the cryptocurrency miners. Huang said: “We are working very hard to bring video cards for the gamers to the market.” Micro Center, a US-based retailer, created a solution for this problem. The company offered discounts for the video cards if the client also buys other components necessary to equip a personal computer (PC).
Anyway, the executives of NVIDIA said that, at least in their case, the higher demand is not coming from the cryptocurrency miners, since the sales of the GPUs for virtual reality artefacts increased in-line with the GPUs for gaming and automatic cars. The demand in these different sectors has increased and raised the profit of the company.
Despite these statements, the number of people involved in the mining of cryptocurrencies is increasing and many companies and localities are joining this business as well, such as the Swiss village of Gondo and the Canadian government. The government encourages the miners to use the excessive electricity produced in the country for their mining operations.
