China's non-stop effort to crack down on cryptocurrency mining farms has started to pay dividends. As the South China Morning Post reported today, graphics card pricing in the country has decreased substantially over the past few weeks. Following up on the South China Morning Post's tip, we've analyzed the historic pricing for various Ampere graphics cards. You can see the pricing trends in our breakdown below, but the clear takeaway is that pricing has receded as much as 45% since Beijing began pulling the plug on big mining farms around the country.
Besides being some of the best graphics cards for gaming, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) cards are also very popular for cryptocurrency mining. It's impossible for us to look at pricing for every single Ampere model, so we randomly picked custom models from each tier to get a general idea of pricing behavior.
The price war is intense, so there's considerable pricing variation for the same graphics card model at different retailers. However, graphics card makers typically have their own online stores at major online retailers, such as Tmall, which is one of the biggest in China. We pulled the pricing from the official stores via Manmanbuy, a popular price tracker in China.
We observed a reduction in pricing up to 45% on some of Nvidia's latest graphics cards, such as the GeForce RTX 3060 — this mid-range Ampere card was one of the more popular models among mining farms in China. The higher-up models exhibited a smaller price reduction, though.
Graphics Card Pricing in China
| Graphics Card | May Pricing | Current Pricing | Reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Gaming X Trio | $2,273 | $2,165 | 5% |
| MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio | $1,624 | $1,237 | 24% |
| Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3060 OC Edition | $1,531 | $835 | 45% |
| Colorful iGame GeForce RTX 3060 Ultra OC | $1,121 | $711 | 33% |
China was a haven for cryptocurrency operations thanks to the country's cheap electricity rates. According to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index dating back to April 2020, China accounted for around 65% of the global Bitcoin mining hashrate prior to the cryptocurrency mining crackdown. Xinjiang, Sichuan, and Inner Mongolia were the three most popular provinces where cryptocurrency miners preferred to set up shop, but many of those operations have been forced to shut down over the last several days.
The Chinese government already banned cryptocurrency mining in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, so Sichuan was the last province to join the list. Mining farms obviously posed a huge threat to China's strong aspirations to achieve peak carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Many miners thought Sichuan would be exempt from the ban since the province uses hydropower instead of coal. However, the province didn't receive any special treatment, either. In fact, the government has instructed electricity providers to evaluate their biggest clients' power consumption to report any abnormalities by June 25.
In addition to the Chinese market, graphics card pricing has also plummeted in Europe. While the price drops are a step in the right direction, we don't expect pricing to stabilize in the near future. Let's not forget that we're still going through a global semiconductor shortage, and it doesn't impact just graphics cards.
