Companies Once Focused On Mining Cryptocurrency Pivot To Generative AI

'Companies that once serviced the boom in cryptocurrency mining are pivoting to take advantage of the latest data gold rush,' reports the Guardian.

Canadian company Hive Blockchain changed its name in July to Hive Digital Technologies and announced it was pivoting to AI. 'Hive has been a pioneering force in the cryptocurrency mining sector since 2017. The adoption of a new name signals a significant strategic shift to harness the potential of GPU Cloud compute technology, a vital tool in the world of AI, machine learning and advanced data analysis, allowing us to expand our revenue channels with our Nvidia GPU fleet,' the company said in its announcement at the time. The company's executive chairman, Frank Holmes, told Guardian Australia the transition required a lot of work. 'Moving from mining Ethereum to hosting GPU cloud services involves buying powerful new servers for our GPUs, upgrading networking equipment and moving to higher tier data centres,' he said.

'The only commonality is that GPUs are the workhorses in both cases. GPU cloud requires higher end supporting hardware and a more secure, faster data centre environment. There's a steep learning curve in the GPU cloud business, but our team is adapting well and learning fast.'

For others, like Iris Energy, a datacentre company operating out of Canada and Texas, and co-founded by Australian Daniel Roberts, it has been the plan all along. Iris did not require any changes to the way the company operated when the AI boom came along, Roberts told Guardian Australia. 'Our strategy really has been about bootstrapping the datacentre platform with bitcoin mining, and then just preserve optionality on the whole digital world. The distinction with us and crypto-miners is we're not really miners, we're datacentre people.' The company still trumpets its bitcoin mining capability but in the most recent results Iris said it was well positioned for 'power dense computing' with 100% renewable energy. Roberts said it wasn't an either-or situation between bitcoin mining and AI.

'I think when you look at bitcoin versus AI, the market will just reach equilibrium based on the market-based demands for each product,' he said... Holmes said Hive also saw the two industries operating in parallel. 'We love the bitcoin mining business, but its revenue is rather unpredictable. GPU cloud services should complement it well,' he said.
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