Nvidia considers restart of block reward mining GPUs

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Computer chip giant Nvidia might restart the production of dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs) for block reward miners, according to Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress.

SeekingAlpha published a transcript of the 19th Annual JP Morgan Tech & Auto Forum Conference, where Kress declared that if demand in the digital currency market picked up to a “meaningful” level, in theory, the company could again start selling the specialized cards called CMPs to address ongoing mining demand.

CMP refers to dedicated crypto-mining cards, which remove the video outputs needed for gamers. This process allows them to be manufactured and sold more cheaply.

U.S.-based Nvidia’s RTX 30-Series GPUs are still popular with block reward miners. Since the RTX 30-Series supply will stay tight until the end of Q1 2021, relaunching CMPs could ease pressure on the consumer product line.

“We’ve seen in terms of constraints, constraints really from the overall global surge of compute and the overall capacity, a capacity that may be necessary for assembly and test and/or sub-trades as well. But again, we remain focused on this and working each day to improve our overall supply situation,” Kress said. “We expect the overall channel inventories, meaning the inventories that are with our AIC partners as well as in our e-tail and retail channels, will likely remain lean throughout Q1,” Kress continued. 

Kress acknowledged that Nvidia still didn’t believe that the block reward mining sector was a big part of its current business, which has seen a surge in valuation in recent weeks. She stated, “We don’t have visibility on how much of the RTX 30 Series end demand comes from mining.” 

Because the company doesn’t know how many cards miners are demanding, its priorities continue to lie in other directions. Nvidia has observed that gaming demand remains strong, and it’s larger than their current supply. 

See also: TAAL’s Jerry Chan presentation at CoinGeek Live, The Shift from Bitcoin “Miners” to “Transaction Processors”