Here we go again: The supply of AMD Radeon graphics cards was already tight, with demand surging in China. Still, with Bitcoin and Ethereum skyrocketing, crypto miners have gone into overdrive, buying up all the stock. The demand will be even worse when Zen 5 comes to market since they are rumored to offer twice the AVX512 performance of Zen 4.

Cryptocurrency mining has always led to a resource drain, particularly in power, water, and land. Crypto miners are now buying AMD Ryzen CPUs in bulk, resulting in shortages. The Ryzen 9 7950X, which is one of the most powerful desktop CPUs for gaming or productivity, is highly sought after in certain regions such as Qubic because it supports AVX2 or AVX512 instruction sets, the key to many mining rigs, as well as its overall efficiency.

It's also more lucrative. A miner can generate almost twice as much profit using 7950X CPUs versus the flagship Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, partly because of the latter's higher price point. Rumors suggest that things will only worsen when Zen 5 CPUs enter mass production later this year.

Chinese technology outlet UDN expects Zen 5 chips to enter TSMC fabs between April and June, with mass production scheduled for the following quarter. Mainstream Zen 5 CPUs will feature "Nirvana" cores, while chips designed for the dense-compute segment for client and server applications will ship with Zen 5c "Prometheus" cores, the publication said.

Of greater importance to crypto miners, though, is that the next-gen AMD chip architecture will offer twice the AVX512 performance of Zen 4, according to Kepler_LS. It also happens that AMD Radeon graphics cards were already in short supply in China due to the US ban on exports of RTX 4090s to the region.

It has become much more challenging to obtain AMD Ryzen CPUs in recent weeks – not so coincidentally around the same time that values of Bitcoin and Ethereum skyrocketed, reviving interest in cryptocurrency mining. Last week, leaker MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) pointed out the shortage on X.

"7950X is out of stock everywhere," he posted. "What happened? Are there any special needs for this CPUs, or is it discontinued?"

The Ryzen 9 7950X is out of stock on Amazon, Newegg, and other retailers. However, some are available through Best Buy and AMD's online store. It didn't take MEGAsizeGPU to figure out what was happening.

"Now I understand," he wrote in a follow-up post. "7950X is the king in Qubic mining."