Large crypto farms have an alternative to bankruptcy: artificial intelligence.
The crypto crash in 2022, and the Ethereum merger, which has stopped using cryptocurrency mining, has forced many crypto farms to close. 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 running in parallel, and that is exactly what cryptocurrency farms can offer.
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 in 2024 and by 20 in 2025, for the same reason.
But it must be clear that this 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, setting up an AI server for a company requires software installation and maintenance personnel .
That is why only large companies that maintain cryptocurrency farms can move from crypto to artificial intelligence, because it requires investment in people, and changes in the infrastructure of said farms.
