NVIDIA's Kagan lambasts crypto as useless for humanity as he touts AI

NVIDIA would rather have its computing chips used for artificial intelligence processing than pointless crypto mining with dubious societal value, according to its CTO Michael Kagan. The Chief Technology Officer of NVIDIA further piled on cryptocurrencies by saying that the company was never happy that its products were used in mining rigs:

I never believed that is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don’t redirect the company to support whatever it is.

The love-hate relationship of NVIDIA with crypto went to such lengths that the GPU card maker put hash rate limiters on popular products that would prevent using them for calculations involved in mining Bitcoin and other digital currencies.

All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does.

NVIDIA is now heavily involved in the artificial intelligence processing boom and even describes itself as the "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing" first and foremost. It sells tens of thousands of AI-dedicated A100 and H100 processing units to Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies which would like to expand or replicate the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

NVIDIA makes the vast majority of AI chips and its Data Center business which is in charge of them is a rare bright spot of growth in the current recessionary period for processing power of all kinds.

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