What you need to know
- Cryptocurrency Ether just crossed the $3,000 mark.
- Its popularity shows no signs of slowing, meaning miners are going to keep grabbing GPUs.
- The fewer GPUs there are on the market, the longer the global shortage will continue.
There's a global shortage of all things semiconductor-related that's been going on for a while now. It's affecting everything from car production to graphics card availability, the latter of which is where cryptocurrency miners are having an impact. Global GPU supply levels were already in dire straits thanks to the pandemic and the universal demand spike for electronics, and cryptocurrency miners are making matters even trickier.
That's not to say that crypto mining is some sort of immense villainy; it's not. It's simply a niche activity that's complicating the lives of average consumers and gamers by sucking up what few new GPUs are on the market. And with today's news that Ether has crossed $3,000 per unit in value, it looks like mining is going to increase its exacerbation of the global shortage.
The $3,000 milestone has been in the works for some time now, as Ether has been steadily climbing in value since July 2020, when it was valued at a lowly $200 per unit. Given its steady growth, the odds are that crypto miners will only be hungry for more, meaning they're going to need more GPUs for mining.
NVIDIA's already tried putting limiters in place to combat the use of its GPUs for mining instead of consumer and gaming purposes, but that fight hasn't been going perfectly. And AMD's not even willing to dish concrete figures regarding how much of its recent financial success is due to crypto miners. Both of these companies are short on hardware because of numerous factors, and the folks hunting for Ether are making it that much trickier for ordinary people to get their hands on the newest GPUs.
In short, if you want a graphics card like the RTX 3060 Ti for gaming, good luck. It's one of the best GPUs for crypto mining, meaning it's likely going to be powering Ether-hunting machines rather than those that just want to run Crysis.
