Several Bitcoin miners canย potentially find non-mining Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI) applications asย well tantalizing to pass up.
Nvidia (NVDA) gave an incredibly rosy financial forecast as the chipmaker advantages from surging demand for hardware to power the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution ushered in by the likes of ChatGPT. It was the talk of Wall Street on Thursday as Nvidiaโs stock price soared.
For Bitcoinย (BTC) (BTC) miners, itโs a reminder that they already have the expertise and data-center space to join in and run Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI) applications. Whether theyโll dive in remains to be seen.
โThe overwhelmingly positive market reactionโ to Nvidiaโs news โwill incentivize more mining corporations to follow suit making announcements of their own and allocating more of their power capacity to other forms of compute,โ stated Ethan Vera, chief operating officer at mining services company Luxor Technologies.
Vera noted the Wednesday notice that Applied Digital (APLD) is working with data center design company Supermicro (SMCI) on its Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI) cloud offering.
Applied Digital is one of a handful of miners that have had their eyes on diversifying their data center space into other areas of computing forย aย time, along with peers Hut 8 Mining (HUT) and Hive Blockchainย Tech (HIVE). Miners will see better margins in Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI) than mining, stated Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins โ at least before another bull run in the price of bitcoin.
Nonetheless, the transition canย potentially not be a straight line. High-performance computing such as Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI) and cloud applications โrequires a different level of infrastructure buildโ than Bitcoinย (BTC) mining, Vera stated. Corporations will have to hire engineers to strategy their sites differently and sales staff to sign up clients, he said.
โItโs not a straightforward process for a miner to repurpose their mines for Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI) compute โ latency, compliance, cooling, environmental factors (humidity, dust) and power redundancy all must be factored in when upgrading a site,โ stated Erin Dermer, Hut 8โs senior vice president of communications and culture, echoing Vera.
Despiteย theย factย that most miners are not likely to repurpose their facilities for Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI), โthere 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 Bitcoinย (BTC) mining. With the rapid growth of Artificialย Intelligenceย (AI), these corporations may accelerate the development of those business lines,โ stated Juri Bulovic, head of mining at Foundry Digital (which, like CoinDesk, is owned by Digitalย currency Group).
Inย theย meantime, Nvidiaโs forecast is lifting AI-linked cryptocurrency cryptoย tokens, including SingularityNET (AGIX), which climbed about 13 percent on Thursday. Fetch.ai (FET) and Render (RNDR) are up greaterย than 5 percent in the past 24 hours, reportsย by CoinGecko data.
UPDATE (May 25, 2023, 20:24 UTC): Adds quote from Foundry Digitalโs Juri Bulovic.
Nick Baker and Aoyon Ashraf.
