Crypto Miner Hive Blockchain Touts Privateness of AI Fashions Working on Its GPUs

Bitcoin mining agency Hive Blockchain (HIVE) goals to permit clients to coach giant language AI fashions in its knowledge facilities, touting higher privateness in comparison with rivals resembling OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the agency mentioned on an earnings name with analysts on Friday.

“Firms now are conscious that they don’t need to add delicate consumer knowledge to an organization like OpenAI that has a public LLM [large language model]. What we aspire to supply at Hive via Hive Cloud is privateness the place corporations can have a service settlement in place, possession of their knowledge and privateness and nonetheless run AI [artificial intelligence] compute workloads on our financial institution of GPUs [graphics processing units],” mentioned Aydin Kilic, CEO and President of the mining agency.

Hive’s shares on the Nasdaq gained virtually 2% on Friday.

Miners have been more and more pivoting to AI as mining economics have interfered with their profitability, with some dealing with bankruptcies, whereas the AI sector sees a growth in curiosity from traders. Nevertheless, it’s but to be decided whether or not miners can compete with massive tech companies resembling Google and Amazon Net Providers who profit from each economies of scale and many years of expertise operating high-quality customer-facing knowledge facilities.

Giant language fashions perceive and generate human language utilizing probabilistic calculations. They’re typically educated on graphics processing items, a kind of digital circuit made up of semiconductors that was initially used for picture processing, however has been discovered to be good at operating AI hundreds.

Hive has a fleet of 38,000 GPUs from the times when it mined ethereum. A few of these it has directed to mining altcoins, whereas others can be found to hire as a service or deployed in its cloud providing.

The agency expects a run-rate of $1 million yearly for its GPUs, it mentioned on the earnings name. Already “500 GPU playing cards generated $230,000 income this quarter,” mentioned the agency’s Chairman, Frank Holmes, in a press launch discussing the annual and quarterly earnings. Hive’s fiscal yr ended on March 31, 2023.

Hive reported $106.3 million in revenues for the fiscal yr ended March 31, 2023, with a gross working margin of $50.4 million, or 47% of income. That’s about half of the historic income it famous in FY2022 of $211.2 million at a gross working margin of 78% of income.

Total in FY2023, the agency reported a web lack of $236.4 million, which it famous included a number of non-cash expenses, resembling $81.7 million of depreciation, an impairment to gear of $70.4 million and an impairment to deposits of $27.3 million. In contrast, the agency reported web revenue of $79.6 million for the fiscal yr 2022.