Ethereum miners are chartering 747s to secure GPU supply

As most gamers know by now, AMD Radeon video cards and a lot of NVIDIA GeForce cards are hard if not impossible to get at normal prices due to the cryptocurrency boom. Miners are buying up everything they can get and it appears this even includes chartering Boeing 747s.

Quartz wrote yesterday that miners are renting entire airplanes because the traditional shipping by sea simply takes too long and entails a large loss of opportunity:

“Time is critical, very critical,” in mining, Marco Streng, chief executive of Genesis Mining, a major ethereum miner, told Quartz. “For example, we are renting entire airplanes, Boeing 747s, to ship on time. Anything else, like shipping by sea, loses so much opportunity.”

“When building our data centers, we have the highest priority on time,” Streng said. “Time counts so much. We are using the fastest delivery possible. You risk the opportunity to mine for the days you are delayed. If you are deploying 10 days later, you are losing 10 days of mining—that is the cost.”

About 36,000 units of new ether can be mined every day, which is worth nearly $7 million at current prices.