AMD suggests cryptocurrency GPU sales are lower than most claim

AMD has released a statement to counter claims that as much as 20 percent of its revenue stream was coming from sales of hardware to cryptocurrency miners. It claims instead that that part of its business represents “single digits”, which could still mean a significant portion of its sales, but not as much as previously claimed.

AMD has posted record revenues over the past quarter and with continued supply and pricing problems for graphics cards like the RX 570, 580 and Vega 56 and 64, many people have suggested that cryptocurrency miners have been buying them all and that that has been a major success for AMD in the past few months. Susquehanna analyst Christopher Roland said in a statement earlier this week that mining could account for 20 percent of AMD’s sales and around 10 percent of that of Nvidia’s.

AMD’s counter claim came swiftly and pointed to a recent earnings call for evidence.

“Yesterday a report was published on AMD which hypothesized very high revenue for Ethereum-related GPU sales. As a reminder, on our Q4’17 earnings conference call we stated that the percentage of annual revenue related to blockchain was approximately mid-single digit percentage in 2017,” AMD said in its statement.

It also went on to suggest that the reason for its increased revenue was because of a “ramping up” of its GPU products and through strong sales of Ryzen and Epyc processors.

While that is likely, the fact remains that AMD GPUs are almost impossible to find at reasonable prices. AMD never sold out of its GPUs quite like this before. Whether cryptocurrency miners or AI developers are driving it, that seems to be the big component of AMD’s latest surge.