Large crypto farms have an alternative to bankruptcy: artificial intelligence.
Two of the big crypto mining companies, Hut 8 and Hive Blockchain, are turning part of their cryptocurrency farms into artificial intelligence centers. And his earnings have skyrocketed.
The “crack” of cryptocurrencies in 2022, and the merger of Ethereum, which has stopped using cryptocurrency mining, it has forced many crypto farms to shut down. Only the largest are surviving, but with losses.
Luckily for them, they have found an important ally in artificial intelligence. Like cryptocurrencies, AI requires enormous processing power through hundreds of GPUs that work in parallel, and that is exactly what the cryptocurrency farms.
Does this mean that artificial intelligence consumes and pollutes the same as cryptocurrency mining? Well basically, yes. The difference is that AI has infinite uses, while cryptos are basically used to speculate, and for the enrichment of a few.
From crypto to AI
As reported by Bloomberg, via Techspot, Hut8 increased its revenue by 11% in 2022 thanks to the conversion of some of its cryptocurrency farms, into artificial intelligence processing centers. Hive expects to multiply its revenue by 10 by 2024 and by 20 in 2025, for the same reason.
But you have to be clear that it is not a simple change of task. Artificial intelligence, luckily for gamers, does not use the gaming GPUs that crypto mining uses. It uses specialized AI chips, such as NVIDIA’s A100 and H100. So not all farms can do the conversion.
On the other hand, while mining is almost an automatic process, mount an AI server for a company requires software installation and maintenance personnel.
That is why only large companies that maintain cryptocurrency farms they can pass from crypto to artificial intelligencebecause it requires investment in people, and changes in the infrastructure of said farms.