AMD Sees Q2 Drop in GPU Sales to Crypto Miners

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) said Wednesday that sales of graphics cards (GPUs) to cryptocurrency miners fell during the second quarter.

The company published its quarterly earnings report late Wednesday afternoon, reporting a 3 percent quarter-to-quarter decline in revenue for its Computing and Graphics segment. The unit brought in $1.09 billion, which AMD said was a 64 percent jump year-over-year. In an earnings call, CEO Lisa Su added that approximately 6 percent of AMD’s revenue came from selling to crypto-miners, down from 10 percent in the first quarter.

Still, that quarterly decline was driven in part from lower revenue from what it called “the blockchain market” – that is, miners who use AMD’s graphics cards for the energy-intensive mining process.

AMD said in its report:

“Computing and Graphics segment revenue was $1.09 billion, up 64 percent year-over-year and down 3 percent quarter-over-quarter. Year-over-year revenue growth was driven by strong sales of Radeon products and continued growth of Ryzen products. The quarter-over-quarter decline was primarily related to lower revenue from GPU products in the blockchain market.”

Further, the GPU maker expects this trend to continue, but it anticipates that sales of other products will offset the decline.

The company expects the decline in GPU sales for crypto mining to continue, though it expects to offset the drop with sales from other products.

“For the third quarter of 2018, AMD expects revenue to be approximately $1.7 billion, plus or minus $50 million, an increase of approximately 7 percent year-over-year, and non-GAAP gross margin to increase to approximately 38 percent, driven by the sales growth of Ryzen and EPYC products, partially offset by lower sales of GPU products in the blockchain market,” AMD said.

During the earnings call, Su said “we’re expecting very little from blockchain” in terms of third-quarter revenue.

“If you update that on a full-year basis, for 2018 blockchain will be lower than what we had previously discussed in our last earnings call. Previously we said mid-to-high single digits … but we’ll watch that develop over the next two quarters,” she said.

AMD image via michelmond / Shutterstock

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