Cryptocurrency mining has become a treasury for graphics card manufacturers. AMD's new Vega56 graphics card was sold out in just minutes after it was launched.

Chipmaker AMD launched a new graphics card (GPU) this week - and it sold out in just minutes.

All major technology blogs were watching the launch of the Vega 56 graphics card, which was officially launched on famous online markets such as Newegg and EBay on August 28. As expected - due to the huge demand from cryptocurrency miners around the world - the vast majority of Vega 56 models were sold out within 5 minutes of the launch.

To make matters worse, manufacturing issues have reportedly limited the supply of the new Vega graphics cards, and there are rumors that resellers may be raising asking prices to increase revenue amid huge demand.

CoinDesk previously reported that companies such as AMD and rival Nvidia have begun to turn to take advantage of strong demand from GPU buyers who are using the hardware to mine cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum. Cryptocurrency mining is an energy-intensive process in which new transactions are added to a blockchain, creating new tokens as a reward for miners.

Even so, AMD isn’t looking at cryptocurrencies as a cash machine right now, stating in an earnings call earlier this summer that it doesn’t see the technology as a long-term opportunity.

This means that AMD may be quietly improving the operating conditions of cryptocurrency miners using their products. According to previous reports, AMD has launched a dedicated driver software for cryptocurrency mining machines.