The world’s largest GPU manufacturer – Nvidia – for the first time has reported its earnings from the chip sales made for crypto mining activities. In the first quarter Q1 of 2018, Nvidia reported a total revenue of $3.21 billion of which mining activity contributed 9% amounting to $289 million.

During the earnings call on Thursday, Nvidia reported that owing to the strong demand in the first quarter, the sales of its chips was at peak high. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said:“Crypto miners bought a lot of our GPUs in the quarter and it drove prices up. I think that a lot of gamers weren’t able to buy into the new Geforce as a result.”

However, the sales in this quarter could reduce to almost 50% said Huang pointing a slow-down in the demand as well as increasing in the competition. This is because, due to huge demand last quarter, retailers were seen selling Nvidia chips at almost twice the cost in some of the markets. However, the demand seems to have been subsided due to increased regulatory pressure in the market.

One of the Nvidia’s competitors – Bitmain reported more revenue. Just when Nvidia reported $3 billion revenue, Bitmain during the same period managed to clock $4 billion in revenues while selling the ASIC miners. Moreover, Bitmain’s product line also includes chips for AI and cloud computing which is currently having a huge demand in the market.

However, on the other hand, Nvidia performed quite well in comparison to its GPU competitor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) during the same quarter.

However, Huang said that although the chip sales due to crypto mining would be considerably less this month, the demand for Nvidia GPUs in the gaming space has shot up considerably. He said: “At the core of it, gaming is strong. The pent-up demand is quite significant and I’m expecting the gamers to be able to buy new GeForces pretty soon.”