GPU shipments confirm that the crypto-mining craze is behind us for now

One day, you’ll have the chance to look a young person in the eye and tell them that you lived through the GPU drought of 2017. And that young person will turn up the volume on their brain-implanted computer and ignore you. But forget about Generation Omega or whatever we’ll call them — now is a time to celebrate that cult-like speculators are no longer buying every GPU on the market to mine for digital coins.

Demand for GPUs fell last quarter, according to graphics-industry tracking firm Jon Peddie Research. As a whole, GPU shipments from manufacturers dropped 1.5 percent from the first quarter of 2018 to the second quarter. Throughout 2017 and early 2018, people are using Nvidia and AMD GPUs to do the processing required to create new cryptocurrencies similar to Bitcoin. But the crypto market has fallen, and that has made it GPU mining too inefficient to make money.