From mining machines to AI intelligence, Bitmain is seeking change

Editor's Note: "Odaily Planet Daily"

Recently, Bitmain CEO Wu Jihan said in an interview with Bloomberg that within five years, nearly 40% of Bitmain's revenue will come from AI chips. This reveals that Bitmain has great ambitions in the field of AI chips. From focusing on mining machine production to embracing artificial intelligence, why is Bitmain seeking change at this time? Is the AI ​​field really a turning point for Bitmain?

Mining machines are difficult to keep up with the progress of blockchain technology

As we all know, cryptocurrency mining is based on the "mining" technology that requires a lot of computing and electricity. With the rise of the mining craze, the number of miners has continued to increase, and a technical competition has begun among miners. In order to increase the speed, CPUs have been replaced by GPUs, and many miners have begun to try ASIC mining, which is faster than GPUs and consumes less power, including Bitmain's products.

The mining machine craze has brought Bitmain from obscurity to the center of the mining arena. Bloomberg reported that nearly 80% of the world's cryptocurrency mining currently requires the use of chips produced by Bitmain.

In April this year, Bitmain released the Antminer E3 for ETH. Before the launch of the Antminer E3, ETH did not have its own ASIC chip, and miners could only use GPUs for mining. The Ethereum mining boom caused AMD and Nvidia's GPUs to be in short supply in the market, and the prices soared. After the launch, the market of AMD and Nvidia was impacted, causing their stock prices to fall.

This has triggered a debate among Ethereum developers about whether there should be another "fork". Each fork has a great impact on "miners". After the fork, a new protocol will be generated, which also means that miners need to update their equipment. With the continuous innovation of blockchain technology, Bitmain's mining machines will sooner or later bid farewell to the stage.

At the same time, as the cryptocurrency boom turned into the largest speculative bubble in history, the Chinese government cracked down on cryptocurrency trading and banned ICOs. This year, the Chinese government sent a signal that it might severely restrict mining. When blockchain no longer requires mining machines and when mining is no longer supported by policies, continuing to focus on mining machines may lead Bitmain to the danger of sinking.

Multiple factors, including market and policy, prompted Bitmain to enter the AI ​​market

Wu is already planning the company’s next move: artificial intelligence.

Wu Jihan previously revealed that, taking artificial intelligence as an example, Bitmain's target is an industry different from BTC. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek at Bitmain's headquarters, Wu Jihan and his executives believed that artificial intelligence chips are a natural fit for Bitmain. Artificial intelligence requires a lot of computing, and Bitmain has sufficient experience in computing enhancement, which will help it develop AI chips.

In fact, Bitmain began to lay out its territory in the field of AI as early as November 2017.

Bitmain officially launched its AI brand SOPHON at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on November 8, 2017. Subsequently, Bitmain began selling an early prototype of the tensor acceleration computing chip "Sophon BM1680".

Although Google launched the Tensor Processing Unit earlier than Bitmain, Google's chips are only available to customers with cloud services. China's ban on Google's cloud services has given Wu Jihan's AI chips a strong position in China. Accelerator cards containing ASIC chips will be more useful for machine deep learning and are cheaper. They can reduce the difficulty of industry + AI with cost-effective AI computing power with performance-to-power ratio.

Last July, the Chinese government announced plans to transform China into a leading AI nation by 2030, investing in research and supporting related businesses. If this support becomes a reality, Bitmain’s concerns about regulatory crackdowns and confusion about its own positioning will become a distant past.

Bitmain’s success in the mining machine market also seems to indicate that Bitmain may be able to overcome its disadvantages in the field of artificial intelligence.