Some Ethereum miners are turning to gaming laptops as GPU supplies run dry

Some China-based Ethereum miners have started hoarding gaming laptops amid a severe shortage of graphics cards or GPUs.

The development comes as the profitability of mining ETH, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, hits a never-before-seen level of profitability.

According to a recent video made by crypto mining pool F2Pool, some of its Ethereum mining customers showcased how they ordered hundreds of gaming laptops, which typically come pre-built with more powerful GPUs.

The review video demonstrated how a gaming laptop with an Intel Core i5 CPU and NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU mined 0.00053 ETH in four hours at a Starbucks coffee shop in Beijing.

F2Pool's CMO Jessica Lu claimed in the video that, based on the ETH price of $1,300 when the video was shot as well as the network's hash rate at the time, a static payback period for the laptop investment would be about 9 to 10 months.

F2Pool's co-founder and CEO Mao Shixing, also known as "Discus Fish" – who himself is a long-time miner-operator – showed pictures of gaming laptops stacked on shelves to mine ETH on his Weibo account last week 

He posted another video on Tuesday that showed what appeared to be more than 100 laptops on multiple shelf units with a caption written in Chinese that translates:

"Many game players scold at us miners. Sorry but blame the market bull run and Huang [NVIDIA's Jensen Huang]. Are you jealous of our hard labor work on the shelves?"

While it remains to be seen how large-scale this strategy may become, it nonetheless reflects the growing craze around crypto mining amid the market's surging prices. That existing players would buy gaming laptops – despite the built-in GPUs being less than ideal for the job given their residual values and hash power output – speaks volumes about the state of the mining space and how far operators will go to source hardware.

Indeed, Ethereum mining's daily revenue per 100 megahash-second of computing power has reached a level not seen since January 2018 after ETH jumped to an all-time-highs above $1,700, according to The Block's Data Dashboard.

The total amount of computing power on the Ethereum network is also at an all-time high, according to available data.

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In a situation similar to the bitcoin mining equipment shortage, there's also an equivalent – if not more severe – supply gap of desktop GPUs to the point that it has caused headaches for games and other customers who don't mind. Chip-making giants NVIDIA and AMD had to address the issues publicly by committing to the production of more GPUs in the coming months.

For instance, searching "3080 GPU" within the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao shows hundreds of relevant merchants that are ranked by their monthly sales volume.

The Block reviewed the top 30 merchants and nearly all of them currently show "out of stock" for a variety of GPU models.

While some individual shops do have available stocks for less-advanced models, they enforce limitations so that a person is allowed to buy only one unit. This is being done in an effort to curb scalping activities.