Bitcoin mining could impact global chip availability in 2018

Last week analyst research firm Bernstein published a report on the profitability of Bitmain, a somewhat secretive Chinese company with a huge impact on the bitcoin and cryptocurrency markets. With estimated profit for 2017 ranging from $3B to $4B, the size and scope of Bitmain is undeniable, with annual net income higher than some major tech players including NVIDIA and AMD. Bitmain has expanded its reach into multiple bitcoin-based markets but the vast majority of its income stems from the development and sale of dedicated cryptocurrency mining hardware.

Though the profitability of Bitmain alone isn’t enough to warrant a discussion of potential impact on the rest of the markets that are tied to computing aspects of bitcoin and other currencies, there is a concern the sudden introduction of multiple additional players in the chip production landscape could alter how other players operate going forward. This includes the ability for NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and others to order chip production from popular semiconductor vendors at the necessary prices to remain competitive in their respective markets.

Bitmain makes the majority of its income through the development of dedicated chips used to mine bitcoin. These ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) offer better performance and power efficiency than other solutions like graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD. The Bitmain chips are then combined into systems called “miners” that can include as many as 250 chips in a single unit. Those are sold to large mining companies or individuals hoping to turn a profit from the speculative cryptocurrency markets for prices ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars apiece.

Bernstein estimates that as much as 70-80% of the dedicated market for bitcoin mining is being addressed by Bitmain and its ASIC sales.

Bitmain has secondary income sources including running mining pools (where groups of bitcoin miners share the workload of computing in order to turn a profit sooner) and cloud-based mining services where customers can simply rent mining hardware that exists in a dedicated server location. This allows interested parties to attempt to profit from mining without the expense of buying hardware directly.

The chip developer and mining hardware giant has key advantages for revenue growth and stability, despite the volatility of the cryptocurrency market. When Bitmain designs a new ASIC that can address a new currency or algorithm, or run a current coin algorithm faster than was previously possible, it can choose to build its Antminers (the brand for these units) and operate them at its own server farms, squeezing the profitability and advantage the faster chips offer on the bitcoin market before anyone else in the ecosystem has access to them.

As the difficulty of mining increases (which occurs as higher performance mining options are released and lowers profitability of older hardware), Bitmain can then start selling the new chips and associated Antminers to customers, moving revenue from mining directly to sales of mining hardware.

This pattern can be repeated for as long as the chip development continues and gives Bitmain a tremendous amount of flexibility to balance revenue from different streams.

Imagine a situation where one of the major graphics chip vendors exclusively used its latest graphics chips for its own services like cloud-compute, crypto-mining, and server-based rendering and how much more valuable those resources would be – that is the power that Bitmain holds over the bitcoin market.

Clearly Bitmain is big business, and its impact goes well beyond just the bitcoin space. Because its dominance for miners depends on new hardware designs and chip production, where performance and power efficiency are critical to building profitable hardware, it competes for the same foundry business as other fabless semiconductor giants. That includes Apple, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, AMD, and others.

Companies that build ASICs as part of their business model, including Samsung, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and even Intel to a small degree, look for customers willing to bid the most for the limited availability of production inventory. Bitmain is not restricted to a customer base that is cost sensitive – instead its customers are profit sensitive. As long as the crypto market remains profitable, Bitmain can absorb added cost of chip production.

NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm are not in as flexible of a position. Despite the fact that NVIDIA can charge thousands for some of its most powerful graphics chips when targeting the enterprise and machine learning market, the wider gaming market is more sensitive to price changes. You can see that in the unrest that has existed in the gaming space as the price of graphics cards rises due to inventory going to miners rather than gamers. Neither AMD nor NVIDIA will get away will selling graphic cards to partners for higher prices and as a result there is a potential for negative market growth in PC gaming.

If Bitmain utilizes the same foundry as others, and is willing to pay more for it to build their chips at a higher priority than other fabless semiconductor companies, then it could directly impact the availability and pricing for graphics chips, mobile phone processors, and anything else built at those facilities. As a result, not only does the cryptocurrency market have an effect on the CURRENT graphics chip market for gamers by causing shortages in the space, but it could also impact future chip availability if Bitmain (and its competitors) are willing to spend more for the advanced process technologies coming in 2018 and beyond.

Nothing is certain in the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrency however. The fickle and volatile market means the profitability of Bitmain’s Antminers could be reduced, lessening the drive to pay more for chips and production. There is clearly an impact from sudden bitcoin value drops (from $20k to $6k as we see saw this month) on mining hardware sales, both graphics chip-based and ASIC-based, but measuring that and predicting it is a difficult venture.