Nvidia is more bullish on cryptocurrency than AMD

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang summed up the chip makers view of cryptocurrencies in a single phrase Thursday: rock n roll.

Thats how Huang described his companys ability to ride out what he sees as a blossoming market for his companys graphics cards in mining the digital currency.

Crypto is here to stay, and the market will grow to be quite large, Huang said Thursday on the companys second-quarter call with analysts. Its not likely to go away any time soon. There will be more currencies to come, they will come from different nationsWe stay very close to the market, and understand the dynamics very well.

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Nvidia NVDA, -5.33% detailed quarterly results Thursday that beat expectations handily for sales and earnings, but the stock plunged more than 6.5% in after-hours trading following an already punishing day during the regular session. The companys shares are still up more than 50% this year, against the S&P 500 indexs SPX, +0.13% gains of 8.9%, as investors bet on Nvidias artificial-intelligence efforts to pay off in server and autonomous-driving sales.

Huang seemed to think crytpocurrency mining could add another long-term growth area to Nvidias bull case Thursday, and hinted at products developed specifically for those efforts, telling analysts on the call that the company offers the coin miners a special coin-mining SKU that is optimized for mining.

When asked whether the CEOs comment confirmed the rumored development of specific cryptocurrency products, an Nvidia spokesman declined to comment.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy told MarketWatch that he didnt believe that Huang was suggesting new cryptocurrency products, but rather offerings that partners in the sales channel were developing with Nvidia chips. Moorhead pointed out that there is at least one card based on Nvidias Pascal architecture that is manufactured by Asustek Computer Inc. 2357, -1.90% and marketed to cryptocurrency miners.

That is a similar approach to how Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD, +0.91% is approaching crypto mining, but Nvidia sounds much more optimistic on the long-term prospects for customers seeking to mine digital currencies.

Some of our partners are also offering mining-specific cards that have a different feature set, such that were really segmenting the market between gaming and mining, Su said on her companys earnings call last month. But its important to say we didnt have cryptocurrency in our forecast, and were not looking at it as a long-term growth driver.

AMD also beat earnings expectations thanks to a boom in cryptocurrency mining that uses graphics-processing units. The development of new digital currencies beyond Bitcoin over the past few months, particularly on the Ethereum blockchain, have seemed to drive sales of the two companies GPUs.

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Nvidia is more bullish on cryptocurrency than AMD