Nvidia Corp. has an unlikely message for some of its most voracious customers: Please don’t buy our latest high-end computer-graphics chip.
The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, a $1,199 graphics card, and the RTX 3070 Ti, which costs about half that amount, have had some of their capabilities deliberately stripped out. Nvidia wants them to be the exclusive preserve of its core gamer customer base and is nixing the products’ ability to effectively mine cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin, seeking to discourage miners from snapping up all the supply to build massive crypto-processing farms. Instead, Nvidia is pushing a chip just for the miners.
Nvidia’s extreme action is one result of the rising influence of cryptocurrencies, touching on the retail market, the environment and the worlds of finance and technology. Virtual currencies have been in the news as the preferred ransom payment method of cyberattackers. Elon Musk tweets about them more often than he does about his carmaker, Tesla Inc. And as they attract new investors and participants daily, cryptocurrencies have grown more unpredictable and hungrier for the hardware used to generate them.