NVIDIA Bracing For A Cryptocurrency Demand Drop

It has been reported that NVIDIA is wary of a possible drop in cryptocurrencies through 2018. This of course will directly affect the company as their GPUs are used in mining such cryptocurrencies. This of course triggered the massive inflation in prices of graphics card over the past year. It seems that over the past couple of weeks prices have cooled down a little bit, although not back to their original levels. The manufacturing division of NVIDIA, which sub-contracts silicon fabrication to TSMC is now calculating the impact a cryptocurrency slump could have on its supply-chain, and are being very conservative with the amount of orders to the foundry.

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A drop in demand of graphics cards could leave various amounts of unsold inventories of old-generation architecture GPUs, which could result in multi-billion dollar inventory write-offs. According to the report by DigiTimes there have been restrictions put in place by NVIDIA so that their add-in card (AIC) partners cannot market the cryptocurrency mining abilities of their graphics cards as well as selling directly to large mining operations.

While the demand for cryptocurrency goes down in 2018 we could also see the introduction of purpose-built crypto-mining ASICs that are tailored for popular cryptocurrencies.

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