Internet cafes may have been shut down as a result of the lockdowns in many countries, but the smart ones continue to make money – in some cases, even more than what they were making before.
Owners of various cybercafes across Asia, previously a go-to place for all gamers and travelers who wanted access to a computer, have now changed their business model to cope with the lockdowns.
One great example is the Computer Star cybercafe in Vietnam, which changed the gaming area into a crypto mining farm. The owner relied on Nvidia’s extremely rare GeForce RTX 3080 flagship graphics cards. As both gamers and crypto miners are looking for the Nvidia RTX 3000 series family of cards, late 2020 saw a huge GPU shortage that continues to this day.
Since an Internet cafe already owns high-powered graphic cards, the change to a mining operation is actually pretty easy.
Neither Nvidia nor its rival, AMD, believe that the shortage will disappear by summer 2021, so many gamers can’t find the GeForce RTX 3000 line from Nvidia or Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards.
Angry gamers have blamed crypto miners for hoarding the already small stock of these products.