NVIDIA wins in investor crypto mining class action lawsuit

It should be self-explanatory that the mining boom is primarily positive for graphics card manufacturers. So, of course, for NVIDIA. The years 2017 and 2018 in particular are remembered with record sales, but NVIDIA also benefited from them in the 4th quarter of 2020. Since the GPU manufacturer did not adequately highlight this in its balance sheet from the investors' point of view and later stuck with high numbers, a class action lawsuit came about in 2019. 

There is now a judgment in the aforementioned proceedings. According to the court, investors have not been able to prove that NVIDIA actually provided incorrect numbers here. The company initially stated that it earned only $ 289 million from miners in the first quarter of 2018. However, around 60% of the graphics cards sold in China are said to have gone to miners in the period from May 2017 to November 2018. However, NVIDIA also released a special mining card during the period mentioned. Thus, the sales figures are extremely opaque and impossible to determine for outsiders. It is therefore not surprising that investors failed with their lawsuit.

In addition, the current availability of the NVIDIA GPUs should not make shareholders happy. Not being able to meet such an immensely high demand is not just ideal from a purely economic point of view. So that there is no additional explosiveness due to the miners, countermeasures are now being taken for the GeForce RTX 3060 . However, there are different opinions about the effect of this measure. The assessments range from sensible to a toothless tiger and a fig leaf for NVIDIA.

But the topic is more topical than ever. In announcing the numbers for the fourth quarter of 2020, according to NVIDIA, of a total of $ 2,495 million in revenue from the GeForce business, about $ 100 million to $ 300 million are owed to the mining business. Here, too, the numbers are likely to be higher, but it is difficult to estimate or prove how large the share of pure miner sales really is.