If I understand correctly, ASICs are having more usefulness as the world are increasing AI adoption, it is not just used only for bitcoin mining anymore. There are many AI centers that are making use of the miners now which might not let the price to fall the way it was falling in the past because of the fall in bitcoin price or bear market. You should have read how some bitcoin miners are now also making AI centers a business.
I had never heard this. I do wonder what use an AI datacenter would have for ASIC chips. Those chips are designed to create a sha256(sha256()) hash, and nothing else, is there a lot of demand for this functionality?
I was under the impression that it was basically the fact that miners had access to good datacenters with cheap power and sufficient cooling that made those places interesting for AI, not the asic's they were running. In this case, you'd think second hand asic's would hit the market pretty hard, since you can only draw 1 Watt once (so either an asic draws it, or an AI GPU), so if they would stuff AI machinery in mining farms, they would have to power off asics...
On the other hand, profiteering has skyrocketed. My company no longer allows me to buy the servers i need because prices went x3 over the last year or so (i need boxes with >= 6Tb ram, prices for those larger DIMM's skyrocketed due to the fact production lines for larger DIMM's got converted into production lines for AI memory). You'd think it was only the memory, but even producers of spinning disks and other hardware that is not affected by AI memory producers started profiteering and increased their prices for their hardware eventough there was no significant reason for them to do so. Maybe it's this overall profiteering that made the prices of other hardware increase instead of decrease?
