Nvidia claims crypto ‘useless’ for society as company continues AI push

Nvidia’s CTO, Michael Kagan has said in a statement that Crypto adds nothing “useful for society” compared to the company’s efforts in AI and other applications.

The world of cryptocurrency appears to be slightly less popular these days, especially for huge chip manufacturer Nvidia. The company has repeatedly restricted its GPUs for cryptocurrency mining, even going so far as to release “LHR” versions of the RTX 3000 series to prevent them from being used in crypto mining rigs. Now moving to the RTX 4000 series, it seems like the company has little to worry about, thanks to better alternatives.

Nvidia also released different GPUs, dedicated to professional mining, and even faced a $5.5 million USD fine for failing to disclose how many graphics cards were being shipped to crypto miners in 2022.

With Ethereum changing to a proof-of-stake model, consumer graphics cards have fallen out of favor with GPU miners. It appears that Nvidia has also seemingly moved on from satiating the demands of cryptocurrency miners, as the company begins a big AI push, which started with its GTC 2023 keynote.

Nvidia CTO on cryptocurrencies: “it doesn’t bring anything useful to society”

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Speaking in an interview with The Guardian, Nvidia CTO, Micheal Kagan has stated the following regarding Nvidia’s relationship with crypto:

“All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does.”

Kagan continued to state: “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 don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.“

The company is leading with a focus on AI in the future, and there are barely any other companies better positioned to provide the sheer computing power required than Nvidia. OpenAI uses Nvidia GPUs to power the famous ChatGPT, with the company reportedly purchasing around 30,000 GPUs.

With the demand for AI products skyrocketing, it’s no wonder that Nvidia has revealed its DGX supercomputers, with a way for smaller companies to purchase the hardware, and begin to power generative AI models, like Google Bard.

For now, though, it appears as though the mainstream crypto boom is over, especially with bigger companies such as Nvidia making public statements about its alleged uselessness.