Nvidia CEO says cryptocurrency “will be here for a long time”

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview on CNBC that cryptocurrency “will be here for a long time” and does not expect enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency craze to fizzle out.

“The ability for the world to have a very low-friction, low-cost way of exchanging value is going to be here for a long time – Blockchain will be here for a long time and it’s going to be a fundamental new form of computing,” Huang told Jim Cramer on the network’s Mad Money segment.

The chip-maker has managed to capitalize on the rise of cryptocurrency mining as more consumers are joining the network using Nvidia’s high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs) to mine digital currencies.

“The reason why cryptocurrency became such a popular thing on top of our GPUs is our GPUs is the world’s largest installed base of distributed supercomputing,” Huang told Cramer.

“Blockchain requires cryptography and the ability to have a public ledger that is completely immutable, perfectly safe, distributed all over the world,” he added.

“Our processor serves as the perfect processor to enable this supercomputing capability to be distributed. And that’s the reason why it’s used.”

However, Huang stressed that the recent crypto demand for GPUs is not going to be one of the major growth drivers for Nvidia in the long-term.

“Gaming is a much bigger business, data center is a much bigger business, our professional graphics is a much bigger business and, of course, in the future, everything that moves will be autonomous and we’ll have autonomous capabilities and that’s going to be a much bigger market,” Huang said.

“Cryptocurrency just gave it that extra bit of juice that caused all of our GPUs to be in such great demand. But I think over the long term, … our fourth growth drivers is what’s going to make Nvidia 10 times larger than it is today.”


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