Some BTC miners might find AI apps that don’t have to do with mining too tempting to pass up.
Nvidia (NVDA) gave a very optimistic financial outlook, as the chipmaker is benefiting from the growing demand for hardware to power the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution started by ChatGPT and other programs. Thursday, Wall Street talked about how Nvidia’s stock price went up.
For Bitcoin (BTC) miners, it’s a reminder that they already have the knowledge and data center space to join in and run AI apps. It’s still unclear if they’ll jump in.
“The overwhelmingly positive market reaction” to Nvidia’s news “will incentivize more mining companies to follow suit making announcements of their own and allocating more of their power capacity to other forms of compute,” said Ethan Vera, chief operating officer at mining services firm Luxor Technologies.
Vera talked about the news from Wednesday that Applied Digital (APLD) is working with Supermicro (SMCI), a company that designs data centers, on its AI cloud service.
Applied Digital is one of a few miners that, like Hut 8 Mining (HUT) and Hive Blockchain (HIVE), has been thinking for a while about expanding its data center space into other areas of computing. Miners will see better margins in AI than mining, said Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins, at least before another bull run in the price of Bitcoin.
But the change may not be in a straight line. Vera said high-performance computing like AI and cloud applications “requires a different level of infrastructure build” than Bitcoin mining. He said that firms must hire engineers to plan their sites differently and sales staff to sign up clients.
Erin Dermer, Hut 8’s vice president of marketing and culture, said something similar to what Vera had said, “It’s not a straightforward process for a miner to repurpose their mines for AI compute latency, compliance, cooling, environmental factors (humidity, dust), and power redundancy all need to be factored in when upgrading a site.”
Even though most miners probably won’t use their resources for AI. According to Juri Bulovic, who is in charge of mining at Foundry Digital, which is owned by the same company as CoinDesk, “There are some miners who have always had a more diverse approach to their business operation, with high-performance compute or edge-compute services, in addition to bitcoin mining. With the rapid growth of AI, these companies may accelerate the development of those business lines.”AI-related crypto coins, like SingularityNET (AGIX), which rose about 13% on Thursday, are getting a boost from Nvidia’s prediction. CoinGecko data shows that Fetch.ai (FET) and Render (RNDR) have increased by more than 5% in the last 24 hours.
