Nvidia appears to have found at least one buyer for its recently announced Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) graphics cards, as orders worth $30 million have been placed with the graphics card maker for an unidentified quantity of mining GPUs.

This order was placed by a graphics card manufacturer for an unidentified quantity of mining GPUs.

The order was placed by Hut 8 Mining Corp. which is a large crypto mining company focused on today's top coin, Bitcoin, reports Tom's Hardware. Business is clearly booming. Perhaps the recent $60,000 valuation of Bitcoin has made that abundantly clear, though.

The exact configuration of the GPUs ordered by Hut 8 is unknown, but there are four to choose from: CMP 30HX, 40HX, 50HX, and 90HX. These numbers roughly match the hash rates offered on these cards, and while the respective GPUs are not revealed (they are very tight-lipped throughout), only the 90HX is suspected to be the latest Ampere generation.

According to Hut 8, the new GPUs will be used primarily in alternative blockchain networks.

Whatever the specs, there is no doubt that $30 million will buy a lot of them; Nvidia does not publicly disclose the price per card, but using a napkin to calculate, roughly 18,600 of the top CMP chips to achieve 1,600 GH/s, or 35,000 or more of what are called Turing chips. At least at Nvidia's rated speeds; the 90HX alone would cost over $1,600 per card.

Nvidia holds all the cards (pun intended).

However, Hut 8 does not use these GPUs for bitcoin mining. Bitcoin has long been dominated by ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), which can now achieve hash rates in excess of 100 TH/s. Instead, GPUs are effective for ASIC-resistant networks such as Ethereum, which manage a few MH/s to 100 MH/s.

"We are very excited to own such a high-performance CMP," says Jaime Leverton, CEO of Hut 8." We believe that mining with CMP opens up new opportunities for Hut 8 and allows us to continue to execute our long and short term plans to increase and diversify our revenue streams.

Fulfillment of the order will begin through May 2021 and is said to be "completed this summer."

However, dedicated mining GPUs are not always considered desirable by cryptocurrency miners. This is because these cards have little resale value outside of other mining operations, as they have no output capabilities. If the value were to plummet, small-scale miners could be doomed. Perhaps that is less of a concern for companies willing to spend $30 million on "new opportunities."

Not many need to be reminded of the impact that the high profitability of cryptocurrencies has had on the graphics card market. While certainly not the sole reason for the recent PC gaming hardware shortage, it has certainly exacerbated the problem.