Crypto Miners, Not Gamers, Were The Primary Buyers of Graphics Cards Since 2021, Almost $15 Billion Worth of GPU Sales Reported

Crypto mining is fading away but there’s no doubt that it has been a curse for the entire PC gaming segment as miners were the main force in driving GPU sales to $15 Billion since the start of the last phase.

Crypto Miners Spend $15 Billion on GPU Units During The Last Mining Craze But Good Days Ahead For PC Gamers As Graphics Card Prices Normalize

In a report by Bloomberg, the pub reports that Crypto miners spent $15 Billion in acquiring mining GPUs during the last crypto craze that started back in 2021. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum reached the historical highs of over $67,000 and $4,800 US, respectively but have since been on a decline & with pricing now crashing down to $18,000 and $960 US, respectively, prices of graphics cards are back to normal levels.

Ethereum miners have spent approximately $15 billion on graphics processing units (GPUs), according to Bitpro Consulting, and that doesn’t include ancillary costs like wiring and transformers.

via Bloomberg

The sudden decline in GPU prices has also made it really hard for crypto miners to recoup their losses since the crypto drop also prompted a drop in graphics card prices. Most crypto miners got their graphics cards are obnoxious rates, hitting almost 3x the MSRP back in 2021. Now, most of these GPUs are being sold under MSRP at resale sites such as eBay. This means that every crypto graphics card that was bought during the 2021-craze will now have to be sold at a major loss. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, the graphics card which produced the highest hash rate in Ethereum, is currently listed for under $1000 US ($1499 US MSRP). The same card was being sold for over $3500 US back when mining was at its peak.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Graphics Cards at eBay:

This sudden inflow of used graphics cards within the resale market means that new graphics cards will have a hard time selling and companies like AMD and NVIDIA (along with their AICs) who had been hoping to clear up their existing GPU stock will now have to compete with the reseller stock that’s cheaper to get. Companies are also resorting to spinning up refreshed deals and marketing campaigns with game bundles, etc, to entice gamers but with the prices of used graphics cards at much lower levels than MSRP, it looks like it will take time for giants like NVIDIA and AMD to clear up older stock (unless offered major discounts and rebates).

This could become a major bottleneck in the launch of the next generation of graphics cards which were expected to launch in Q3 2022 but may now be pushed back to Q4 2022 as reports have highlighted. According to statistics from Jon Peddie Research, it was reported that desktop graphics card sales amounted to $51.8 Billion in the entirety of 2021 (49.021 million GPUs sold).

Miners won’t be left with nothing. After the Merge, their mining setups will still be powerful computing devices that can be put to use elsewhere, and some are planning to mine other coins or find alternative uses for the gear. After the Merge, Petzold is considering using his rigs for an aspect of digital video production known as rendering, which can require significant computing resources. “There are other uses for the cards: You can make it into a render farm, you can do different machine-learning options,” he says. “They are just not going to be as profitable as mining has been.”

Some miners are hoping to do better by moving to mine other coins that require GPUs, such as Ethereum Classic or Ravencoin. The more miners who flock to any coin, the harder it is to make a profit.

via Bloomberg

Following are the GPU shipment data extrapolated by Tomshardware using JPR’s statistics:

Even at retailers such as Newegg and Amazon, the prices of graphics cards are now either at MSRP or slightly below MSRP which is good for the entire PC Gaming GPU market. With crypto now done for good, we can hope for better days ahead of us and also hope that the next-gen graphics cards will not face the same issues as the existing generations which had troubles not only with pricing but also with the entire scalping and supply situaton.

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