The chief financial officer for the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest independent semiconductor foundry, cited cryptocurrency mining in the firm’s third-quarter results.
The company – which provides semiconductor manufacturing services for a range of industries, including firms that design and assemble application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for cryptocurrency mining – announced third quarter revenue of $8.32 billion, an increase of 17.9% compared to the previous quarter and 1.5% year-over-year. Boosting those figures, she said, was demand for semiconductors to be used in mining products.
Lora Ho, TSMC’s chief financial officer, said in a statement:
“The strength of our third quarter revenue was driven mainly by major mobile product launches and a generally healthy demand environment, including cryptocurrency mining. However, this strength of our third quarter revenue was partially dampened by our customers’ continued inventory management.”
It’s a notable acknowledgement from a major hardware manufacturer, but one that’s also perhaps unsurprising given past statements from other companies that have seen windfalls from the interest in mining, or the energy-intensive process by which new transactions are added to a blockchain (which, in turn, creates new cryptocurrency tokens for the miner that successfully creates a new block).
Both Nvidia and AMD, which make graphics cards, have both pointed to mining as a beneficial force for their bottom lines. Indeed, it was Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang who declared in August that “cryptocurrencies and blockchain are here to say.”
Mining activity, as pointed out by some Wall Street analysts, has also attracted investors to the companies’ public stocks.
Image via Shutterstock
The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. Have breaking news or a story tip to send to our journalists? Contact us at news@coindesk.com.