Billions dollars in revenue from the Crypto industry
With the existence and development of more than a decade of the crypto industry, Nvidia has become the largest graphics card supplier for the crypto mining industry. Despite making billions of dollars in revenue from graphics chips dedicated to cryptocurrency mining, Nvidia still believes that cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful to society”.
Michael Kagan, the company’s chief technology officer, thinks that other areas that use the power of graphics such as artificial intelligence chatbots – such as ChatGPT – are much more valuable than cryptocurrency mining.
Mr. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia
Despite being one of the major beneficiaries, Nvidia has never been open-minded about the sector. Even in 2021, the company even released software to limit their ability to use graphics cards for Ethereum mining. This is an effort to secure supply for their more preferred customers, such as gamers and AI researchers. Mr. Kagan said the decision was fair due to the limited use value of using graphics chips to mine cryptocurrencies.
AI is more useful than Cryptocurrency?
The first instance of ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer made up of about 10,000 high-end Nvidia AI GPUs.
In an interview with the Guardian, Kagan said: “All crypto-related operations need parallelism, and (Nvidia) is the best for that, so everyone just needs to programmed it for this purpose. They buy a lot of cryptocurrency and then it crashes, because it doesn’t bring any benefit to society. AI does.”
“With ChatGPT, everyone can make their own machine, their own program. You just tell it what needs to be done and it will. And if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, you just tell it “I want something else”.
Cryptocurrencies are high-frequency trading — an industry that once brought a lot of business to Mellanox, the company Mr. Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia.
“We used to be heavily involved in trading too: people on Wall Street were buying from us to save nanoseconds of connection, banks were doing crazy things like pulling a cable across the Hudson River to save a few more nanoseconds between their data center and the stock exchange.” He said.
“I never believed that cryptocurrency was something that would benefit humanity. Everyone does crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell your stuff to them. But you not redirect the company to support whatever that is.”
Nvidia becomes the heart of AI development
Once known for producing powerful graphics cards designed for gamers to play the latest games. Nvidia products are now at the heart of an explosion of new AI tools.
The computationally intensive operations of training a new AI system could require billions of dollars worth of computing power. It’s running significantly faster on the graphics processors that gamers still use today.
Microsoft has revealed that it has purchased tens of thousands of AI-optimized graphics processors from Nvidia to train ChatGPT chatbot. In addition, Nvidia also sold 20,000 H100 GPUs to Amazon to operate their AWS cloud computing service.
Nvidia also has its own cloud-based chip rental service, with the $37,000/month DGX cloud providing access to eight H100 GPUs linked directly together into “a processor cluster “.
Speaking at the company’s annual meeting last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saw his company as the engine that powers the “iPhone of AI” and said the “manufacturing AI” generation. which the support company will “reinvent nearly every technology industry.”
