Jon Peddie: Miners bought $500 million worth of GPUs in Q1 2021

Jon Peddie Research made an attempt to estimate how many video cards got gobbled up by cryptocurrency miners. The research firm has been tracking the attach rate of add-in board (AIB) to PCs since 1985. According to Jon Peddie Research, this model is an excellent guide for making a prediction of how much of the GPU supply really went to miners. The model only tracks dedicated miners, aka the large mining farms, and not casual miners.

So how many GPUs went to miners?

Based on the increase of the AIB attach rate, Jon Peddie Research believes about 700,000 high-end and mid-range video cards went to miners and speculators in Q1 2021. In dollar terms, this comes down to roughly $500 million. This represents the retail value of these cards, which includes the margin from the video card makers and the retail channel.

For comparison, NVIDIA sold $2.76 billion worth of gaming GPUs in its fiscal first quarter. AMD's GPU sales are unknown as the company does not provide this kind of granularity in its financial reports.

The model predicts that about 25% of the AIBs shipped in Q1’21 went to miners and speculators. That’s approximately 700,000 high-end and midrange AIBS in Q1’21. And the market value is about $500 million—a half a billion dollars.

Now, before you run out and buy AMD and Nvidia shares, understand that they are not getting that surge in pricing—the channel is, and the speculators are getting even more. -- Jon Peddie Research