Ahead of the Merge, large Ethereum Miners Look towards Cloud Computing and Artificial intelligence
Some of the world is largest Ethereum Miners are planning to shift their computing power to cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) ahead of the Ethereum networks move to a different type of consensus mechanism — an upgrade, also known as the Merge.
The Merge is set to take place around September 13-16, and the network will switch from proof-of-work (PoW) in favor of proof-of-stake (PoS), which will eliminate the need for large amounts of computing power and data centers, and is anticipated to reduce the network is energy consumption by at least 99.95%.
Canadian cryptocurrency miner Hive Blockchain (HIVE) – which was skeptical of the upgrade even happening just last month – said on Tuesday that it was testing other coins that are mineable with its fleets of graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as cloud computing and Artificial intelligence applications.
The Cryptocurrency Miner already has a test pilot project running at a "Tier 3" data center, where a portion of the Nvidia A40 GPU cards are being applied to cloud computing. "These GPU cards [A40] can be used for cloud computing and Artificial intelligence applications, and rendering for engineering applications, in addition to scientific modeling of fluid dynamics," the crypto firm said in a press release.
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Meanwhile, another Canadian Crypto miner, Hut 8 (HUT), which has been diversifying into high-performance computing since the start of 2022, also said on Tuesday that its latest batch of installed GPUs will be "designed to pivot on demand to provide Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or VFX rendering services to users."
There has been plenty of speculation on what the Ethereum miners will do after the upgrade. One line of theory is that Ethereum miners will redirect their mining rigs to Ethereum Classic, which is the splinter network that emerged from the 2016 hard fork after a hack in which $60 million was stolen from one of the earliest decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) on the Ethereum blockchain network.
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Ethereum Classic has, in fact, occurred as a potential winner ahead of Ethereum is upgrade event scheduled for later this month, with network metrics surging to lifetime highs and ETC tokens gaining value in a largely little-changed Cryptocurrency Market. The Ethereum Classic hashrate reached over 48.64 terahashes per second (TH/s) as of Tuesday morning, having surged more than 133% since July, while ETC tokens have gained some 28% in the past 24 hours.
Hive is share price fell by more than 5%, while Hut 8's share was down by about 3%, in line with most of the mining peers on Tuesday.
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