It’s safe to say that – at least financially speaking – Nvidia has had a rocky relationship with cryptocurrency in recent months. The leading computer tech developer has seen its stock price tumble, as media outlets continue to tie the chipmaker to cryptocurrency mining. In spite of this association denting Nvidia’s share price, CEO and President Jensen Huang still stands by cryptocurrency and what it will mean for the future of finance.
Huang recently took to the air on popular CNBC show Mad Money to discuss his views on the “crypto craze”, along with how he feels that we’re only in the early days of a cryptocurrency revolution. Speaking to host Jim Cramer, Huang said, “Cryptocurrency will be here. The ability for the world to have a very low-friction, low-cost way of exchanging value is going to be here for a long time.”
Standing by Bitcoin
Nvidia has grown from being a simple chipmaker to being one of the biggest tech-centric companies in the world. Through the company’s growing product catalog, it delivers high-powered GPUs to both companies and consumers. Through intended and unintended means, Nvidia found itself successfully riding the recent cryptocurrency wave. However, as Wall Street turned on Bitcoin, it appears to have dampened Nvidia’s share price. For most companies, this would have seen the Bitcoin links be reined in, but Huang and Nvidia have remained firmly in the corner of the growing cryptocurrency market. “Blockchain’s going to be here for a long time and it’s going to be a fundamental new form of computing. I expect blockchain [and] I expect cryptocurrency to be an important driver for GPUs,” said Huang.
The perfect choice
Not afraid to embrace more controversy, he’s openly admitted that Nvidia’s product line is the “perfect” choice for cryptocurrency mining – especially when it comes to Bitcoin. Huang wasn’t just making a throwaway statement either, “The reason why cryptocurrency became such a popular thing on top of our GPUs is our GPUs is the world’s largest installed base of distributed supercomputing.” Furthering that sentiment, Huang explained, “Blockchain requires cryptography and the ability to have a public ledger that is completely immutable, perfectly safe, distributed all over the world. Our processor serves as the perfect processor to enable this supercomputing capability to be distributed. And that’s the reason why it’s used.” Huang’s comments are clear, Nvidia is fully backing the cryptocurrency movement.
Increasing demand
GPU demand has skyrocketed thanks to the increase in cryptocurrency mining activity, but Huang was quick to point out that it’s far from being a leading growth driver for Nvidia. The large percentage of Nvidia’s revenue still comes from its data center, professional graphics visualization, and video game business links. Nvidia’s involvement in self-driving car development is also reaping financial benefits. “Gaming is a much bigger business, data center is a much bigger business, our professional graphics is a much bigger business and, of course, in the future, everything that moves will be autonomous and we’ll have autonomous capabilities and that’s going to be a much bigger market,” Huang reiterated. Huang does believe that Nvidia’s cryptocurrency involvement could mean more in future, “Cryptocurrency just gave it that extra bit of juice that caused all of our GPUs to be in such great demand. But I think over the long term, our fourth growth drivers [are] what’s going to make Nvidia 10 times larger than it is today.”
Nvidia has a cryptocurrency vision
Nvidia is known the world over as a leading chipset manufacturer, but it’s having a surprising impact on the cryptocurrency market as a tech provider. Many expected Nvidia to pull back on its crypto associations in the coming months, but given Huang’s recent comments the brand now looks all set to head in the other direction!
