Nvidia burns $5.5 million settling with SEC on GPU sales to crypto miners

pcinvasion.com:

We all had a bad time waiting out the graphics card shortage that took place from late 2020 up until recently, but it wasn’t the first time crypto mining was to blame for a lack of Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

Back in 2017 and 2018 there was another similar situation going on with the GTX 10 Series that led to huge profit increases for Nvidia and higher prices for gamers. Although the sting back then wasn’t nearly as bad as what we just experienced, it does point to a trend at how Nvidia likes to handle sales.

Simply put, cryptomining and productivity tasks are for business and gaming is just a hobby (for most). Expectedly, companies and profit-geared individuals are far more willing to pay more and to buy in bulk compared to traditional individual retail sales for graphics cards.

Once things started heating up during the last crypto boom, Nvidia was in a great place as a market leader to supply plenty of graphics cards for increased demand. Although the company still doesn’t admit to it, there’s clear evidence that GPU sales surged and subsequently fell based on the volatile nature of the crypto market. This is where the SEC had a problem with Nvidia’s accounting.

Coincidentally, Nvidia witnessed a sharp decline in revenue for the RTX 20 Series when crypto was also down.

As a publicly traded company, Nvidia is required by law to share information with investors so that they can make future investment decisions. For whatever reason, Nvidia chose to be vague at best, and perhaps dishonest at worst with its investors. It attributed its massive revenue gains at the time to gaming and not sales to crypto miners.

Even after investors pressed the issue, enough doubt persisted to get the SEC involved in auditing Nvidia’s sales. This