Recently, the company that manufactures computer chips and video cards, Nvidia, published its financial statements, in which for the first time it specified its corresponding revenues for sales related to cryptocurrency mining.
According to Nvidia, the demand for video cards (GPU) by the cryptocurrency miners was quite high during the first quarter of the year, which implied an income of $ 289 million dollars for this company. This was confirmed by the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, who stated the following:
The crypto currency miners bought many of our GPUs in the quarter and that raised the prices (...) As a result I think that many gamers could not buy the new GeForce.
However, the company explained that, probably, the sales related to the cryptocurrency mining fall around two thirds during the current quarter. Thus, although sales were higher than expected in the first quarter, demand is expected to decrease in the second half of the year.
Cryptocurrency mining is usually done using GPUs or using integrated circuit equipment for specific assignments (ASICs), so the increased demand for hardware to mine cryptocurrencies also affects ASICs.
This means that it is expected that other companies in this industry will report significant gains during the first quarter of this year. This has been the case of TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing company, which published its financial statements for the first quarter of 2018, according to which it broke its sales record thanks to the strong demand for chips. for cryptocurrency mining.
It is interesting to mention that Bitmain, the largest company in the world dedicated to the manufacture of ASIC equipment and one of the most important customers of TSMC, has launched new mining equipment for cryptocurrencies such as siacoin (SC), in recent months. monero (XMR) and more recently ether (ETH), with the Antminer E3, which also seems to respond to a greater demand of equipment by the miners.