The DoE has also been a fairly active purchaser of GPUs for almost two decades now thanks to the Exascale Computing Project [0] and other predecessor projects.

The DoE helped subsidize development of Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, etc along with the underlying stack like NVLink, NGC, CUDA, etc either via purchases or allowing grants to be commercialized by Nvidia. They also played matchmaker by helping connect private sector research partners with Nvidia.

The DoE also did the same thing for AMD and Intel.

[0] - https://www.exascaleproject.org/

The DoE subsidized the development of GPUs, but so did Bitcoin.

But before that, it was video games, like quake. Nvidia wouldn't be viable if not for games.

But before that, graphics research was subsidized by the DoD, back when visualizing things in 3D cost serious money.

It's funny how technology advances.

It was really Ethereum / Alt coins not Bitcoin that caused the GPU demand in 2021.

Bitcoin moved to FPGAs/ASIC very quickly because dedicated hardware was vastly more efficient they were only viable from Oct 2010. By 2013 when ASIC’s came online GPU’s only made sense if someone else was paying for both the hardware and electricity.