Nvidia Clocks $289 Million Revenue From the Crypto Mining Sector Alone, in Q1

It is for the first time that chip-making giant Nvidia has reported the revenue from the chips sale done specifically to the cryptocurrency market for crypto mining activities. During an earnings call on Thursday, the company said that the demand for cryptocurrency was a lot stronger in the first quarter which alone helped the company earn $289 million in revenues.

In the first quarter Q1, the company has reported a total revenue of $3.21 billion while beating its estimated earnings of $2.89 billion. The contribution due to the crypto earnings is 9% of its total earnings.

The crypto sales made by the company has beaten its estimates of $200 million by nearly 50% more. However, the company expects that the revenue in the second quarter could fall considerably due to the growing competition from its rival as well as lowering demand in the market.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said: “Crypto miners bought a lot of our GPUs in the quarter and it drove prices up. I think that a lot of gamers weren’t able to buy into the new Geforce as a result.”

Last year during the second-half of 2017, the cryptocurrency craze surged at an unprecedented rate and so did the demand for GPUs in mining the digital currencies. The demand was so high that in some of the markets, retailers were selling chips for almost twice its original costs.

However, other players like Bitmain has also emerged as strong players while taking some of the burden of crypto mining from Nvidia. In fact, Bitmain reported more revenue than Nvidia last year as Bitmain’s products also include chips for AI and cloud computing which saw an increasing demand last year.

Nvidia has reported $3 billion in operating profits, while Bitmain reported $4 billion selling the ASIC miners. Everyone from the crypto mining community is waiting for the launch of Bitmain’s more powerful and robust Antminer E3 coming later this year. With this launch, Bitmain is expected to take the majority of the share of the chip-related crypto market.

However, during the same time, Nvidia has managed to beat its other competitors like AMD. Despite the growing regulatory pressure, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that the popularity of digital currencies will grow in the next few years. Huang said that “ability for the world to have a very low-friction, low-cost way of exchanging value, is going to be here for a long time”.