Nvidia will pay $5.5 million as part of a settlement with the SEC

Nvidia will pay $5.5 million as part of a settlement with the SEC for failing to properly inform investors about how cryptocurrency miners were fueling demand for its graphics cards.

Nvidia neglected to reveal how digital money mining drove development in the second and third financial quarters of 2018, which occurred in 2017, the SEC said in a recording.

The deal marks the end of a saga in which Nvidia, best known for producing graphics cards for games, ended up with a surprise boost in revenue from cryptocurrency miners who then refused to go intangible. Nvidia declined to comment.

Illustrations cards, similar to those Nvidia makes, are appropriate to mine ethereum. In 2017, ether costs rose from under $10 to more than $800, inciting diggers to purchase new equipment to trade out.

Nvidia's games category, which is how the company reports these sales, grew 52% year-over-year in the second quarter of fiscal 2018 (ended June 30, 2017) and 25% in the following quarter, but Nvidia did not disclose the cryptocurrency's effect on this growth, according to the SEC.

Nvidia knew that digital money mining was driving piece of its business, as indicated by the SEC documenting.

The company's China sales staff at the time thought the increased demand for gaming GPUs was due to miners, and Nvidia's senior management wanted to pursue the cryptocurrency mining market, according to the filing. the SEC.

Be that as it may, cryptographic money might have turned out to be an interruption for Nvidia as request developed for its illustrations cards for their planned purposes, gaming and man-made brainpower.

In 2021, Nvidia released new mining cards called Cryptocurrency Mining Processor and added software to its graphics cards to prevent them from being used for mining. Nvidia's graphics cards were extremely scarce in 2020 and 2021 due to pandemic-driven gaming demand that prompted users to upgrade their home gaming PCs.

Be that as it may, CMP deals have declined strongly since their presentation. In the latest quarter, CMP income was just $24 million, down from $266 million in the August 2021 quarter.

"Our GPUs are capable of mining cryptocurrencies, although we have limited visibility into the impact of this on our overall GPU demand," Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress said in a comment on the results in February.