Listen, here's an interesting story about Nvidia, which again shows how far the company is moving away from cryptocurrencies and is increasingly immersed in artificial intelligence.
This week, Nvidia suddenly canceled its participation in the project with Arbitrum, which is a second-tier network on Ethereum, where many AI startups related to blockchain hang out. At first, it was planned that Arbitrum would become an exclusive partner of the new Ignition AI Accelerator program. She helps startups by providing them with infrastructure and mentors. But at the last moment, Nvidia said, "Stop, we're not going any further," and that's it—without explanation.
This is not an accident. Nvidia has long had a rule: no crypt in their acceleration programs, like the same Inception. And this position has been dragging on since 2018, when the collapse of Ethereum left the company with a mountain of unclaimed graphics cards. At the same time, they also fined 5.5 million dollars for unreliable reporting of income from crypto mining. Since then, the lesson has been learned.
The company's management is also not shy about expressions. Michael Kagan, Nvidia's technical director, bluntly said that cryptocurrencies were "useless" and compared them to real technological advances like artificial intelligence. At the GTC 2024 conference, even when one of the co-founders of the NEAR blockchain was next to the CEO of Nvidia, the conversation was still only about AI.
It turns out that Nvidia clearly shares priorities: AI is the future, and the crypt is just a fashionable but empty story. They choose the side where they see real benefits and development, rather than short-term benefits and volatility.
So I'm thinking — maybe Nvidia knows something that we haven't seen yet? Why do you think AI is so much more important to them than cryptocurrencies?