Nvidia CEO comments on GPU shortage caused by Ethereum

There’s currently a shortage of Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia’s CEO pointed to Ethereum distributed ledgers as the cause. Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference he spoke to a group of journalists following his keynote address and addressed the shortage.

Huang simply stated that Nvidia is not in the business of cryptocurrency or distributed ledgers. As such, he stated he preferred if his company’s GPUs were used the areas Nvidia is targeting though explained why Nvidia’s products are used for crypto mining.

“[Cryptocurrency] is not our business,” he said. “Gaming is growing and workstation is growing because of ray tracing.” He noted that Nvidia’s high performance business is also growing and these are the areas he wished Nvidia could allocate units for.

Huang explained why crypto miners are using Nvidia’s products echoing what he told me in an interview last week.

“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,” he said, adding “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.”

So what is he going to do about it? “We have to build a whole lot more,” he told TechCrunch last week. “The video supply chain is working really hard, and you know all of our partners are working around the clock. 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.”