Jakarta –
The prestige of crypto mining continues to decline, forcing miners to rack their brains looking for new ‘toys’. Some of them chose artificial intelligence (AI).
There are at least two large crypto mining companies, Hut 8 and Hive Blockchain, which have shifted their crypto mining infrastructure to high-performance computing (HPC), including renting it out for AI data processing.
The two activities, several types of crypto mining and AI data processing, use the same resources, namely the graphics chip or GPU. This transition is considered to be able to reduce the investment losses of crypto mining companies that have already bought GPUs, but then the price of their crypto assets has fallen.
As is known, several years ago crypto miners actively bought up PC graphics cards to mine Ethereum, which then made the price of these graphics cards skyrocket. But then the Ethereum mining system changed so that it no longer needed a graphics card. As a result, miners have to sell their used graphics cards because they are no longer used.
But fortunately, the graphics chip is actually also the ‘brain’ of generative AI processing such as ChatGPT. Even Nvidia has said that its graphics card will be more useful if it is used for AI, not crypto mining.
The HPC Hut 8 business in 2022 generated around USD 16.9 million, or around 11% of its total income. Meanwhile Hive is targeting revenue growth from the HPC sector, from the previous USD 1 million to USD 10 million in 2024 and USD 20 million in 2025.
This income will be used to save their investment for Nvidia graphics cards of USD 66 million in 2021, quoted detikINET from Techspot, Friday (12/5/2023).
It’s just that you need to remember that not all crypto miners can rely on AI to save their business. The reason is that only about 15% of crypto miner’s graphic cards can be converted for HPC.
What’s more, processing AI data requires additional hardware and a large number of employees. Not to mention seeing competitors in this business realm, namely Microsoft via Azure and Amazon Web Service, both of which also offer HPC infrastructure in their portfolio.
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(asj/fay)
2023-05-12 14:14:59
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