Crypto Miners Spend $15 Billion on GPU Units During The Last Mining Craze But Good Days Ahead For PC Gamers As Graphics Card Prices Normalize
In a report by Bloomberg, the pub reports that Crypto miners spent $15 Billion in acquiring mining GPUs during the last crypto craze that started back in 2021. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum reached the historical highs of over $67,000 and $4,800 US, respectively but have since been on a decline & with pricing now crashing down to $18,000 and $960 US, respectively, prices of graphics cards are back to normal levels. The sudden decline in GPU prices has also made it really hard for crypto miners to recoup their losses since the crypto drop also prompted a drop in graphics card prices. Most crypto miners got their graphics cards are obnoxious rates, hitting almost 3x the MSRP back in 2021. Now, most of these GPUs are being sold under MSRP at resale sites such as eBay. This means that every crypto graphics card that was bought during the 2021-craze will now have to be sold at a major loss. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, the graphics card which produced the highest hash rate in Ethereum, is currently listed for under $1000 US ($1499 US MSRP). The same card was being sold for over $3500 US back when mining was at its peak. via Bloomberg NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Graphics Cards at eBay: This sudden inflow of used graphics cards within the resale market means that new graphics cards will have a hard time selling and companies like AMD and NVIDIA (along with their AICs) who had been hoping to clear up their existing GPU stock will now have to compete with the reseller stock that’s cheaper to get. Companies are also resorting to spinning up refreshed deals and marketing campaigns with game bundles, etc, to entice gamers but with the prices of used graphics cards at much lower levels than MSRP, it looks like it will take time for giants like NVIDIA and AMD to clear up older stock (unless offered major discounts and rebates). This could become a major bottleneck in the launch of the next generation of graphics cards which were expected to launch in Q3 2022 but may now be pushed back to Q4 2022 as reports have highlighted. According to statistics from Jon Peddie Research, it was reported that desktop graphics card sales amounted to $51.8 Billion in the entirety of 2021 (49.021 million GPUs sold). Following are the GPU shipment data extrapolated by Tomshardware using JPR’s statistics: Some miners are hoping to do better by moving to mine other coins that require GPUs, such as Ethereum Classic or Ravencoin. The more miners who flock to any coin, the harder it is to make a profit. via Bloomberg