Morgan Stanley Expects Cryptocurrency Mining on AMD Cards to Fade

The stock of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) was the worst performer on the S&P 500 on Monday. The reason for the weak performance was a downgrade of its stock by investment bank Morgan Stanley to ‘underweight’.

AMD has been experiencing a rally this year due to cryptocurrency miners gobbling up every powerful GPU as soon as it hits the market in order to generate maximum profits, even causing a shortage of AMD high-end graphics cards. However, the investment bank’s analysts now expect this trend to come to an end.

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“We believe that AMD’s graphics surge has been caused by a sharp increase in sales of graphics chips to cryptocurrency miners. We expect this to meaningfully decelerate next year,” Joseph Moore, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in the report.

Just a few months ago, video gaming sites reported that it is becoming impossible for gamers and ordinary PC users to get their hands on any 1080p-capable AMD Radeon graphics cards, due to miners grabbing them first.

In August the CEO of rival chipmaker NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) said that the cryptocurrency mining market is here to stay. The GPU manufacturer added: “We stay very close to the market, and understand the dynamics very well.” Considering this, Morgan Stanley might not be expecting crypto mining on GPUs to stop completely but just suspect that NVIDIA could push AMD out of this growing niche in 2018, hence the pessimism.