Nvidia (NVDA) offered an extremely bullish financial forecast as the chipmaker benefits from a surge in demand for hardware to power the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution led by companies like ChatGPT. That was the talking point on Wall Street Thursday as Nvidia’s stock soared.
For Bitcoin (BTC) miners, this is a reminder that they already have the expertise and data center space to incorporate and run AI applications. Whether they will sneak in remains to be seen.
Ethan Vera, chief operating officer of mining services firm Luxor, said the “absolutely positive market reaction to Nvidia’s news” “will inspire more mining companies to follow suit, make announcements of their own, and allocate more power capacity to other forms of computing” technology.
Vera noted that Applied Digital (APLD) announced Wednesday that it is working with data center design firm Supermicro (SMCI) on its AI cloud offering.
For some time now, Applied Digital has been one of the few miners to diversify its data center space into other areas of computing, along with peers Hut 8 mining (HUT) and the Hive blockchain (HIVE). Wes Cummins, CEO and chairman of Applied Digital, said that miners will have higher profit margins in artificial intelligence than mining — at least until the price of bitcoin is bullish again.
However, the transition may not be a straight line. High-performance computing such as artificial intelligence and cloud applications “require a different level of infrastructure development” than bitcoin mining, Villa said. Companies will have to hire engineers to plan their sites differently and salespeople to sign customers up, he said.
“Repurposing mines for AI computing is not a straightforward process for miners – latency, compliance, cooling, environmental factors (humidity, dust) and power redundancy all need to be taken into account when upgrading sites ,” said Hut’s Erin Dermer. 8’s Senior Vice President of Communications and Culture, echoes Vera.
Sharing his experience, Cummins said building an AI industry-standard data center in North Dakota costs ten times as much as mining.
While most miners are unlikely to repurpose their facilities for AI, “some miners have been operating in a more diversified way, providing high-performance computing or edge computing services in addition to bitcoin mining. With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, these companies may accelerate the development of these business lines,” said Juri Bulovic, director of mining at Foundry Digital (which, like CoinDesk, is owned by Digital Currency Group).
Meanwhile, Nvidia’s forecast is boosting artificial intelligence-related cryptocurrency tokens, including SingularityNET (AGIX ), which rose about 13% on Thursday. Fetch.ai (FET) and Render (RNDR) are up more than 5% in the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko.
b>Update (20:24 UTC, 25 May 2023): b>Update (12:40 UTC, 26 May 2023): Added a second quote from Wes Cummins, Applied Digital.
Edited by Nick Baker and Aoyon Ashraf.
Information source: compiled by 0x information from COINDESK.Copyright belongs to the author Eliza Gkritsi, without permission, may not be reproduced