NVIDIA's market capitalization surpasses 5 trillion: A look back at its brief honeymoon period with Crypto Assets.

Author: Aki Wu said Blockchain

At the end of October 2025, Nvidia's stock price hit a historical high, with its market value breaking the $5 trillion mark, becoming the first company in the world to surpass this market cap threshold. Since the emergence of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, Nvidia's stock price has increased by more than 12 times. The AI revolution has not only driven the S&P 500 index to new heights but has also sparked discussions about a tech valuation bubble. Today, Nvidia's market value even exceeds the total size of the entire cryptocurrency market. In terms of global GDP ranking, Nvidia's market cap is only behind the United States and China. It is remarkable that this superstar of the AI era once had a 'honeymoon period' in the cryptocurrency field. This article will review the tumultuous history of Nvidia and the cryptocurrency mining industry, as well as why it chose to pivot towards its core AI business.

Crypto Bull Market Frenzy: Gaming Graphics Cards Transform into “Money Printers”

Looking back at the history of NVIDIA, it is also a legendary narrative of the continuous evolution of technology. Founded in 1993, NVIDIA started by inventing the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and rode the wave of the PC gaming boom in the late 1990s, with its GeForce series graphics cards achieving great success, quickly rising to become the dominant player in the graphics card market. However, as the gaming market gradually became saturated and growth slowed, NVIDIA also faced the dilemma of unsold inventory. Fortunately, opportunities always favor those who are prepared — — a major turning point was the cryptocurrency boom.

In 2017, the prices of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum soared, triggering a “mining” craze. Because GPUs are very suitable for parallel computing for mining, global miners scrambled for graphics cards, and for a time, GPUs became money printing machines, in short supply, with prices skyrocketing. Nvidia became one of the biggest winners behind this crypto bull market, reaping massive profits from card sales.

In the second half of 2020, the cryptocurrency market made a comeback after experiencing two years of winter. The price of Bitcoin soared from less than $15,000 in the middle of the year to over $60,000 at the beginning of 2021, while Ethereum rose from several hundred dollars to over $2,000. This new round of soaring coin prices reignited the fervor for GPU mining. Miners rushed to buy the new generation of GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, causing high-end cards originally aimed at gamers to become highly sought after, leading the market into a state of 'supply not meeting demand' madness once again. When Nvidia's RTX 30 series graphics cards were released, they amazed gamers with their high performance and cost-effectiveness, but with the explosive increase in Ethereum mining profits, the actual selling prices of these graphics cards skyrocketed to outrageous levels. The suggested price of the RTX 3060, priced at 2499 yuan, was being speculated to 5499 yuan in the market, and the flagship RTX 3090 even commanded prices nearing 20,000 yuan.

However, the ongoing shortage of graphics cards has brought the conflict between gamers and miners to the forefront. NVIDIA has chosen a “dual-line parallel” approach, reducing the Ethereum hash rate for the GeForce aimed at gamers (starting from the RTX 3060), but it was later found to be merely a case of burying their heads in the sand. In reality, miners discovered that by plugging a “dummy HDMI” into the RTX 3060, it made the card believe that other graphics cards were also functioning as display adapters, thereby bypassing the computing power limits in multi-card scenarios and enabling full-speed mining.

Andreas showcased this demonstration on his Twitter

On the other hand, a series of Cryptocurrency Mining Processors (CMP) has been launched specifically for miners, attempting to achieve “diversion”. The official blog clearly stated on the same day: “GeForce is born for gamers, CMP is born for professional mining.” CMP will eliminate display outputs and open shrouds to enhance airflow in densely packed mining rigs, and will lower peak voltage/frequency in exchange for energy efficiency stability. However, it is precisely because CMP lacks display outputs and has a short warranty period that it is more challenging for miners to exit. Meanwhile, GeForce can both mine and be refurbished for resale to unfortunate gamers, offering better residual value and liquidity. Therefore, in the end, this project was all talk and no action, eventually fading from people's sight.

According to NVIDIA's financial report, in the first fiscal quarter of 2021, graphics card sales for “mining” accounted for one-quarter of the quarterly shipment volume, and the sales of cryptocurrency-specific chips ( CMP series ) reached 155 million USD. Boosted by the cryptocurrency boom, NVIDIA's revenue for the entire year of 2021 soared to 26.9 billion USD, a 61% increase from the previous year, and the company's market value once surpassed 800 billion USD.

However, this good situation did not last long. On May 21, 2021, the Financial Committee of the State Council of China proposed a severe crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading activities. Subsequently, regions such as Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Sichuan successively rectified and shut down mining sites, and mining operations quickly came to a “stop.” Between the same month and the next, Bitcoin's computing power and price faced pressure simultaneously, forcing miners to relocate or liquidate their equipment. By September 24, the central bank and multiple departments issued a joint notification categorizing all virtual currency-related transactions as illegal financial activities, and proposed a national requirement for “orderly exit from mining,” further “plugging holes” at the policy level.

For miners in Huaqiangbei, the cycles of skyrocketing and plummeting prices are no longer surprising. Those who experienced the “mining disaster” crash in early 2018 still remember it vividly; some quietly withdrew, but a few persevering individuals braved the cold winter, putting unsold mining machines into self-operated mining farms to wait for the next market wave. It has been proven that the bull market of 2020-2021 allowed the players who held on to make a comeback.

In September 2022, a milestone event occurred in the cryptocurrency industry as the Ethereum Blockchain completed its “Merge” upgrade, transitioning from the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism to Proof of Stake (PoS), eliminating the need for large quantities of graphics cards for mining. This marked the end of the GPU mining era that had lasted for years. With the special demand from cryptocurrency miners diminished, the global graphics card market quickly cooled down, directly impacting Nvidia's performance. In the third quarter of 2022, Nvidia's revenue fell by 17% year-on-year to $5.93 billion, with a net profit of only $680 million, a staggering decline of 72% year-on-year. Nvidia's stock price dropped to around $165 in 2022, nearly halving from its peak, as the once lucrative crypto benefits turned into a burden on performance.

Draw the Line: Nvidia's Breakup with the Mining Industry

Faced with the madness of the mining circle and complaints from gamers, as well as problems brought about by cyclical profits, Nvidia has gradually realized that it must seek balance in the wave of cryptocurrency mining and appropriately “draw a clear line” with it. With the bubble concerns brought by the soaring coin prices, the company has also suffered in terms of financial compliance. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) later investigated and found that Nvidia had failed to adequately disclose the contribution of cryptocurrency mining to the revenue growth of its gaming graphics card business for two consecutive quarters in fiscal year 2018. This was deemed improper information disclosure. In May 2022, Nvidia agreed to settle with the SEC and pay a $5.5 million fine. This incident made Nvidia re-evaluate its subtle relationship with the cryptocurrency industry; while the mining boom brought considerable profits, on the other hand, its volatility and regulatory risks could potentially harm the company’s reputation and performance.

After Ethereum transitioned to PoS in 2022, the demand for GPU mining plummeted sharply, and NVIDIA's gaming graphics card business quickly returned to a normal supply-demand situation. Jensen Huang has also emphasized multiple times that the company's future growth will mainly come from fields such as artificial intelligence, data centers, and autonomous driving, rather than relying on speculative businesses like cryptocurrencies. It can be said that after experiencing a peak and subsequent cooling of the “mining card craze”, NVIDIA decisively drew a line with this highly volatile industry, investing more resources into the broader and more socially valuable AI computing landscape. At the same time, NVIDIA has also clearly listed “non-qualifying organization types” on the official website of its latest Inception program for AI startups, which includes “companies related to cryptocurrency,” indicating that NVIDIA clearly wishes to distance itself from its previous crypto friends.

So after fully embracing the AI industry, does Nvidia's chip business still intersect with the cryptocurrency industry? On the surface, since Ethereum bid farewell to the “mining era”, the connection between GPUs and traditional cryptocurrency mining has significantly weakened. Mainstream cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have long used dedicated ASIC miners, and GPUs are no longer the “hot commodity” that crypto miners compete for like they used to. However, there is still some intersection between the two fields, and new points of integration are emerging in various forms.

Some enterprises that had been deeply involved in crypto mining are shifting their business focus to AI computing services, becoming new customers of Nvidia. Moreover, traditional Bitcoin mining companies are also beginning to explore using surplus electricity and space resources to undertake AI computing tasks. Recently, some large mining companies have replaced part of their mining-specific chips with GPU hardware for training AI models. In their view, compared to the turbulent cryptocurrency mining, AI training can provide a more stable and reliable source of income.

The Person Who Made the Most Money in the AI Gold Rush — Nvidia, the “Shovel Seller”

In November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT emerged, causing a huge stir globally with AI large models. For Nvidia, this is undoubtedly another “once-in-a-century” opportunity bestowed by fate. The whole world suddenly realized that to drive these AI monsters that “consume computing power like drinking water,” it is inseparable from Nvidia's GPU hardware support.

After ChatGPT became popular, major technology companies and startup teams flocked to the “large model” track, and the demand for computing power required to train AI models has surged explosively. Nvidia keenly captured this essence: no matter how technology changes, computing power is always the basic currency of the digital world.

Currently, Nvidia occupies over 90% of the large model training chip market share. A100, H100, and the new generation Blackwell/H200 GPUs have become the industry standard for AI accelerated computing. Due to demand far exceeding supply, Nvidia has extraordinary pricing power and profit margins on high-end AI chips. According to Goldman Sachs, capital expenditures from the five major cloud service providers—Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle—are expected to approach $1.4 trillion between 2025 and 2027, nearly tripling compared to the previous three years. This substantial investment in real money strengthens the foundation behind Nvidia's astronomical market value.

But there was once a “cost reduction and efficiency improvement” shockwave in the AI field — the explosive rise of the open-source large model DeepSeek. The DeepSeek project claims to have trained the DeepSeek V3 model, which performs comparably to GPT-4, at an extremely low cost of about 5.576 million dollars, and subsequently launched the R1 model with ultra-low inference costs.

At that time, there was an uproar in the industry, and many people were pessimistic about NVIDIA, believing that the emergence of low-cost AI models meant that small and medium-sized enterprises could deploy large models with fewer GPUs, which might impact the demand for NVIDIA's high-end GPUs. “Will the demand for AI computing power be replaced by an efficiency revolution?” became a hot topic of discussion. Affected by this expectation, NVIDIA's stock price once plummeted significantly, closing down about 17%, evaporating approximately $589 billion in market value in a single day (considered one of the largest single-day market value losses in U.S. stock history).

However, just a few months later, it proved that this concern was a case of seeing the tree but not the forest. What DeepSeek brought was not a reduction in computing power demand, but rather an explosion of new computing power demand. Its technical route essentially achieved “computing power parity” — by means of algorithm innovation and model distillation, it significantly lowered the hardware threshold for large models, enabling more institutions and enterprises to afford AI applications. On the surface, due to the improvement in model efficiency, it seems that “not so much computing power is needed”; but in reality, the DeepSeek phenomenon greatly popularized AI applications, leading to an exponential growth in computing power demand. A large number of enterprises rushed to access DeepSeek, triggering a wave of AI applications, and inference computing quickly became the new mainstay of computing power consumption. This corroborates the well-known “Jevons Paradox” — an increase in technological efficiency actually accelerates resource consumption. DeepSeek has lowered the threshold for AI and caused a surge in applications, resulting in an even greater shortage of computing power resources.

It has been proven that whenever a new AI model is born, it often means new GPU orders follow. The more AI innovations, the stronger Nvidia becomes, which has been reaffirmed in the recent DeepSeek incident. Nvidia's financial report released in February 2025 shows that its data center business far exceeded expectations. Looking deeper, the success of DeepSeek is not a threat to Nvidia; on the contrary, it indicates that “cost reduction and efficiency enhancement” will lead to larger-scale application expansion, thereby increasing the overall demand for computing power. This time, DeepSeek has become the new fuel for Nvidia's computing power empire.

As artificial intelligence pioneer Andrew Ng said, “AI is the new electricity.” In the era where AI is electricity, computing power suppliers like NVIDIA undoubtedly play the role of electric companies. Through vast data centers and GPU clusters, they continuously supply “energy” to various industries, driving intelligent transformation. This is also the core logic behind NVIDIA's market value skyrocketing from $1 trillion to $5 trillion in two years — there has been a qualitative leap in global demand for AI computing power, with tech giants from various countries competing to invest in an arms race for computing power.

After the market value climbed to 5 trillion dollars, Nvidia's influence and size have even surpassed that of many national governments in economic terms. Nvidia is no longer just a “graphics card” manufacturer that makes game visuals smoother, but has transformed into the fuel of the AI era, becoming the recognized “shovel seller” in this gold rush. With the increase in size, the wealth creation myth of Nvidia employees is continuously spreading within the industry, and the stock value held by many Nvidia employees has even exceeded their annual salary. Moreover, Nvidia itself has achieved one self-leap after another by continuously “telling” new technological narratives. Gaming graphics cards opened the first door for it, the mining boom provided the second growth, and AI has truly taken Nvidia to the pinnacle.