Nvidia CEO: GPU Production Boost Needed Because of Crypto Miners

Nvidia must increase its production of graphics processing units (GPUs) to address a shortage caused by cryptocurrency miners, said the company's chief executive on Monday.

The California-based company's GPUs are highly sought after by both gamers and crypto miners due to their parallel processing power – and the surge in crypto mining has made it difficult for gamers to get their hands on the products, said Jen-Hsun Huang, who is also the company's co-founder, during an interview with TechCrunch.

He noted that:

"We're sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it's a real challenge keeping [graphic cards] in the marketplace for games ... we have to build a whole lot more ... We've got to come closer to the demand of the market. And right now we're not anywhere near close to that and so we're just going to have to keep running."

The demand comes – at least partly – from the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies, Huang explained.

He told TechCrunch that "at the highest level the way to think about that is because of the philosophy of cryptocurrency - which is really about taking advantage of distributed high-performance computing – there are supercomputers in the hands of almost everybody in the world so that no singular force or entity that can control the currency."

Despite the GPU shortage, crypto miners still comprise only a small portion of Nvidia's total business, Huang said in the interview.

Last month, Huang noted that "crypto ... is not going to go away" during an interview with Barron's. At the time, Nvidia announced that its revenue from cryptocurrency miners had beaten expectations, though chief financial officer Colette Kress minimized the impact miners actually had during an earnings call.

Jen-Hsun Huang image via Nvidia Taiwan / Flickr