Nvidia is expecting a massive drop in GPU sales to cryptocurrency miners

Inventories of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 10 series are holding strong two days after cards became widely available at MSRP, including both Founders Editions and custom cooled cards. That's good news for gamers who are in need of a GPU upgrade. Even better is that Nvidia doesn't anticipate cryptocurrency mining putting on a strain on supply, as was partially the case before. Instead, it expects crypto sales to drop by around two-thirds in the current quarter, Bloomberg reports.

Cryptocurrency mining wasn't solely to blame for the shortage—memory pricing played a big role as well, as our own Jarred Walton recently wrote about. However, Nvidia did readily admit that cryptocurrency had a bigger impact last quarter than it expected.

"Crypto miners bought a lot of our GPUs in the quarter and it drove prices up," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on a conference call. "I think that a lot of gamers weren’t able to buy into the new GeForce as a result."

Nvidia is coming off a record quarter in which revenue shot up 66 percent year-over-year to $3.21 billion. Out of that, cryptocurrency miners contributed $289 million, Nvidia said. AMD and Nvidia have typically avoided throwing out specific figures in relation to crypto sales, but with the landscape changing (at least for now), it seems Nvidia is more comfortable talking about the impact it had.

A two-thirds drop is a big deal, assuming Nvidia's estimates turn out to be accurate. It means that recent availability shouldn't turn into a short-lived phenomenon, and that the sour situation (for gamers) was the aberration, not the other way around.

Of course, we're talking about paying MSRP for a graphics architecture (Pascal) that has been on the market for a long time now, so there is some tempered enthusiasm there. However, this hopefully means that Nvidia's next generation cards, whenever they come out, won't be so hard to purchase.