For the first time, Nvidia is peeling back the curtain on just how much money cryptocurrency mining is sending its way.
New sales figures revealed by Bloomberg show the company raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue directly due to the cryptocurrency boom. According to Nvidia, demand was higher than expected and brought in $289 million in revenue.
“Crypto miners bought a lot of our GPUs in the quarter and it drove prices up,” Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said on a conference call. “I think that a lot of gamers weren’t able to buy into the new GeForce as a result.”
Huang made headlines in March when he said cryptocurrency is here to stay.
“Cryptocurrency will be here. The 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.
Blockchain’s going to be here for a long time and it’s going to be a fundamentally new form of computing. I expect blockchain, I expect cryptocurrency to be an important driver for GPUs.”
Despite the impressive results, Nvidia says it expects its revenue from the cryptocurrency market to be significantly smaller in the second quarter.
Last year, Nvidia earned $9.7 billion in revenue.
