Even though Nvidia’s stock has fallen under pressure for the chipmaker’s ties to cryptocurrency mining, Nvidia founder, President and CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t expect the crypto craze to die down anytime soon.
“Cryptocurrency will be here. 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,” Huang told CNBC on Thursday in an interview with “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer.
Huang’s company is less a chipmaker now than a catch-all computing company producing high-powered graphics processing units, or GPUs. For months, Nvidia rode the wave of cryptocurrency popularity before Wall Street analysts soured on the volatile trend.
“Blockchain’s going to be here for a long time and it’s going to be a fundamental new form of computing,” Huang told Cramer. “I expect blockchain, I expect cryptocurrency to be an important driver for GPUs.”
Huang admitted that Nvidia’s processors were the “perfect” vessels for employing the capabilities needed to mine cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
“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 explained.
“Blockchain requires cryptography and the ability to have a public ledger that is completely immutable, perfectly safe, distributed all over the world,” he continued. “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, even with the crypto craze fueling GPU demand, Huang emphasized that it’s far from being a growth driver for Nvidia.
The majority of Nvidia’s growth comes from the video game business, professional graphics visualization, the multi-billion-dollar data center business and the encroaching self-driving car business, the CEO said.
“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.”