The digital gold rush in the wake of bitcoin mania took everyone by surprise, with hardware providers for crypto mining included. This spurs an increase in demand for graphics cards (GPUs) and mining rigs.
Top 8 bestselling GPUs- Supply shortage

According to Boardchannels (an online information provider of hardware products including main board and graphics card),

in December 2017, sales of the top 8 bestselling GPUs in mainland China rose about 6% compared to the previous month, and 24% compared with the year earlier. Thanks to the vigorous crypto mining, most brand factory failed to replenish the warehouses fast enough for miners’ increasing demand, especially those of mid/high-end.

The top 8 showed are Colorful, Galaxy, ASUS, Sapphire, Maxsun, MSI, Gigabyte and Zotac, among which ASUS and Sapphire stand out to see increase compared with sales in November. It indicates that they make a larger contribution to the increase of December, offsetting the drop of other brands. Colorful, a relatively favorable and cost-effective brand in China, well ahead in sales, is a common choice for many game beginners. ASUS, advertised as “rock solid”, its Radeon RX580 is among the most popular in miners with the price around $300. Graphics cards of ASUS, Sapphire, MSI and Gigabyte are heavyweight candidates for bitcoin miners by their need and budget.

Colorful, Galaxy, ASUS, Sapphire, Maxsun, MSI, Gigabyte and Zotac

Top List Of GPUs Sell In Of December 2017 (compared to November) In Mainland China

Other brands also make a fortune thanks to the top 8’s supply shortage, they achieve a total 38.5% monthly growth. As long as stock is ready, you can easily sell at high price.

In brief, a large number of graphics cards run to crypto mining market, especially mid/high-end ones, far outperforming the needs of gamers for games like Battlegrounds, for which Nvidia is obviously not happy and speaks out against rising price of GPUs due to mining.

Mining rigs- Price doubles even triples in several months

Along with the rising price and supply shortage of graphics card, mining rigs are also driven up all the way. As a low-tech electronics, its price in China who contributes 70%-80% world’s mining rigs is varied day by day, and it even gives birth to scalpers who “pump and dump” mining rigs.

“A S9 Antminer rockets from 10,000 yuan just several months ago to nearly 30,000 in December, and you can see different prices every day and may be told ‘out of stock’ for most time.” a miner in Sichuan said.

“It is said that a guy sold his second-hand mining rigs at the price of 20,000 yuan per unit after mining for three months, really earning a big bucket as the purchased price was 10,000 yuan, not to mention the gains from bitcoins he mined.”

The world’s top three producers of cryptocurrency mining machine are all based in China, they are AntMiner of Bitmain, Avalon of Canaan and Ebit of Ebang. Though they are all very young, they indeed have already earn a lot in these mining years. The net profit of Canaan increases 125 times in only two years from 2.24 million CNY in 2015 to 300 million in 2017.