Hive Blockchain Aims to Allow Customers to Train AI Models in Data Centers

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Hive Blockchain Aims to Allow Customers to Train AI Models in Data Centers

Hive Blockchain (HIVE) is looking to provide customers with the ability to train large language AI models in its data centers, with the added benefit of better privacy compared to competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Aydin Kilic, CEO and President of the mining firm, stated, “What we aspire to offer at Hive through Hive Cloud is privacy where companies can have a service agreement in place, ownership of their data and privacy and still run AI [artificial intelligence] compute workloads on our bank of GPUs [graphics processing units].” On Friday, Hive’s shares on the Nasdaq gained almost 2%.

As mining economics have become increasingly difficult, miners have been pivoting to AI. However, it is yet to be seen if miners can compete with tech giants such as Google and Amazon Web Services who have the advantage of economies of scale and decades of experience running data centers. Large language models use probabilistic calculations to understand and generate human language, and are often trained on GPUs. Hive has a fleet of 38,000 GPUs, some of which are used for mining altcoins, while others are available to rent or deployed in its cloud offering.

Hive reported $106.3 million in revenues for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023, with a gross operating margin of $50.4 million, or 47% of revenue. This is about half of the historic revenue it noted in FY2022 of $211.2 million at a gross operating margin of 78% of revenue. Overall in FY2023, the firm reported a net loss of $236.4 million, which included several non-cash charges.