Bitcoin hype causing a worldwide bottleneck in computer chip manufacturing and an AI revolution hitting our collective framework like an avalanche.
While the situation had stabilized again after the recent upheavals and the sometimes drastic slump in the economy – remember 2020? A global chip shortage was paralyzing productions in numerous industries. The reasons for this was in part in the boom in cryptocurrencies – above all that of bitcoin and now AI. But let’s go back a few years.
In the area of ​​PC components, there have been delivery bottlenecks for months during the pandemic – for example, the production of graphics cards has been affected by a chip shortage for a long time. But this shortage of chips is increasingly slowing down other industries as well: For example, it was recently reported from circles in the automotive industry that production employees even had to be sent on short-time work due to the supply bottlenecks for chips.
However, the heavyweights of the chip industry such as NVIDIA and AMD are currently not assuming that this deficiency can be remedied in the course of the first half of 2021.
Triggered by the crypto boom: Shortage of microchips also affects the mining industry
Not only the “classic” economic sectors were affected by the shortage of microchips – the mining industry, especially that of the crypto currency Bitcoin, was also struggling with far-reaching consequences, according to the Reuters news agency. Mining hardware prices skyrocketed. Corresponding stocks from well-known manufacturers of mining hardware had already been exhausted by August 2021. The remaining goods are now traded with correspondingly high premiums.
For example, if you had to put around 1,900 dollars on the table for a miner like the Antminer S19 in November, more than 2,700 dollars were due in mid-January – a price increase of almost 50%.
The trigger for this development was above all the astonishing rally of the Bitcoin of the past weeks and months. This made crypto mining more lucrative than ever before, despite the Bitcoin halving that took place in May 2020, which halved the block reward of the market-leading digital currency.
Consolidation and shift in the balance of power are expected
It is above all the big players in the industry, North American mining companies, that buy up the lion’s share of the mining hardware available on the market. With this approach, which could already be observed last year, the companies want to increase their market shares and above all put the Chinese miners under pressure. Their market share has already fallen from 80% to 50%. However, it is above all the private and small mining companies that suffer from this price pressure.
A consolidation of the industry from several decentralized miners to a few large ones is already foreseeable.
A.H.
