Overall, revenue from GPU sales has grown from $3.82 billion in 2015 to $6.45 billion this year. For GPUs used in data centers, the revenue has skyrocketed from $168 million in 2015 to $1.1 billion, according to Gartner. GPU makers see big profitsĪs cryptocurrency mining has soared, so, too, has sales revenue for GPUs used as add-on cards for PCs over the past three years, it has nearly doubled, from $2.7 billion to $4.7 billion. "Given the enormous spike in bitcoin prices towards the latter half of last year, it could be a few more months before supply for high end GPUs matches up with demand and constraints ease," Brody said. The burgeoning interest in bitcoin over the past year – and the attendant rush to buy GPU cards – could affect the GPU market for a while longer. But as AMD's supply dwindled and cards became harder to find, NVIDIA's processors became the popular ones for crypto miners, Li said. In the beginning of the GPU rush, the most popular cards were those made by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). "This resulted from the short supply of graphics cards as the cryptocurrency miners have purchased large sums of them for high-speed processors." "The price of graphics cards risen markedly over the past few years," Melodi Li, an analyst with TrendForce, said in an email. MicroCenter, for example, is offering gamers who purchase GPUs MSRP pricing.Įarlier this year, GPU maker NVIDIA asked retailers of its hardware to prioritize sales to gamers over cryptocurrency miners. Some retailers are taking action to limit the number of cards crypto miners can purchase and are showing pricing favoritism to their more traditional gaming customers. "NVIDIA and AMD agree that cryptocurrency mining market for GPUs will be volatile and dependent on entry and exit of waves of cryptocurrencies from early phase (optimal for GPUs) to mature (transition to ASICs)," Rau said in an email reply. And AMD's OEM 4GB RX 580 six-pack is retailing for $3,600. The video gaming website GameSpot noted that a 6GB GTX 1060 six-pack (Founder's Edition or EVGA) is selling for $3,780, while a pack of MSI Aero ITX OC GTX 1060 cards is listed for $3,465.Ī top-of-the-line GTX 1080 is priced at $6,300 for a six pack, but you can't find them. For example, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1070, which once retailed for $380, according to Polycon, can now go for more than $700.
The prices for some GPUs have more than doubled. One problem, however, is that the most popular digital currency – bitcoin – has a limited number of coins and as that number shrinks in size, the processing power required to mine them increases.ĭue to performance/watt advantages, the most popular GPUs were NVIDIA GeForce GTX1070, AMD RX480, and AMD RX580, according to Shane Rau, research vice president for Computing Semiconductors at IDC.
Tech vendors such as 3M are now marketing new " liquid immersion cooling" systems to cryptocurrency miners to address overheating issues on their mining rigs. If that stays the same, then we will see a slow-down in build-out and probably a retirement of older systems soon, as well, to bring capacity back down," Brody said via email. "Transaction volumes are down significantly in the last two months – back roughly to the level they were at two years ago. The number and size of data centers now processing bitcoin transactions is still growing, though for the moment that is largely due to inertia and the long cycles required to contract, build and deploy mining systems, according to Paul Brody, Ernst & Young's (EY) Global Innovation Leader for Blockchain Technology. Networks dedicated to bitcoin mining reportedly consume more energy than the country of Bulgaria.Ĭryptocurrency miners have also set up rigs in regions where the cost of electrical power is relatively inexpensive, prompting some countries, such as China, and even U.S. Mining rigs and even large data centers dedicated to crypto mining have also consumed more and more energy. In order to beat out others for digital currency, tech savvy users and even groups have taken to buying high-end "gaming processor cards" – GPUs (otherwise known as graphics processing unit cards) – to build "mining rigs" to generate the highly valuable cryptocurrencies. Sales and prices of graphics processing units (GPUs) have soared in recent years because bitcoin miners have been snapping them up to create server farms dedicated to attaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.īitcoin and some other digital currencies can be awarded by solving complex mathematical algorithms known as " Proof-of-Work," also known as crypto mining.
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