It’s not just miners of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, that are looking for new revenue streams. Former ether miners have also shown a tendency to offer HPC services, the bank said, noting that since the, there has been a high supply of graphics processing units for sale in the secondary market because GPUs used for ether mining “lost their utility.”
Some ether miners sold their GPUs to salvage their investment, while some repurposed their machines for gaming, image and video rendering services, and mining other“However, mining these cryptocurrencies were not as profitable as mining ether due to their lower market caps and questions about their long-term viability,” analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote.
“With the rapid growth of AI, the increased demand for high performance computing is now opening a new and perhaps more profitable avenue for utilizing GPUs previously used for ether mining,” the analysts wrote. Bitcoin miners are also trying to diversify in terms of geography, with Russia emerging as one of the global leaders second to the U.S., in terms of bitcoin mining power consumption, the report added.