Crypto miner Hive Digital CEO sees AI working in unison with blockchain

cointelegraph.com:

Crypto mining firm Hive Blockchain sent a signal to the tech industry when it dropped “blockchain” from its namesake in July, opting to call itself Hive Digital Technologies and reflect its artificial intelligence foray.

The decision is part of a wider movement from crypto miners to pivot outside of digital currency mining, amid depressed crypto prices. January saw crypto mining firm Riot Blockchain rebrand to Riot Platforms while June saw crypto miner Applied Digital announce a $460 million deal to host AI cloud computing in its data center.

Since ETH mining ended in September 2022, $HIVE has been transforming its fleet of 38,000 Nvidia GPUs from miners into cloud infrastructure, marking the next stage of our evolution into a diversified data center operator.

Read the latest HIVE Newsletter: https://t.co/raHqwMMalv pic.twitter.com/tHkVuLMtyT

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Hive Digital Technologies CEO Aydin Kilic and Chairman Frank Holmes reiterated the company is still heavily involved in Bitcoin and crypto mining — despite the name change.

However, they now see two nascent sectors — blockchain and AI — as being almost symbiotic when it comes to Web3 development, with Kilic stating:

Pointing to the key differences between Web2 and Web3, Kilic suggests that AI will be used to upgrade the user experience of Web3 over time.

“AI allows Web3 to be more adaptive. In Web2 you have all this metadata but you lose your privacy because all of the big Internet companies are secretly harvesting all this data for their profit,” said Kilic.

“With blockchain, you have all this privacy and can own your own data. But without that metadata, how will you have a curated web experience? So that's where the AI comes in to make it more adaptive and