Jensen's 'Extra Bit of Juice' Was Actually $1.3B: Nvidia's Gaming-Mining Switcheroo Gets Court Date

A U.S. district court has greenlit a class action lawsuit against Nvidia and CEO Jensen Huang after investors claimed the company quietly stuffed over $1 billion in crypto mining revenue into its gaming division like a degens hiding their losses in a different wallet. The filings allege that during the 2017-2018 crypto boom, Nvidia had the market believing they were selling high-end gaming GPUs to streamers and gamers when really, ETH miners were buying up every chip they could find. Once the crypto market decided to take a nap and prices reversed, Nvidia was left holding a massive pile of inventory that nobody wanted—a situation every crypto trader knows intimately, except Nvidia's stock actually dropped.

The plaintiffs first dropped their lawsuit in 2018, accusing Nvidia of playing fast and loose with the truth by failing to disclose roughly $1.3 billion in crypto-related sales. Jensen Huang himself tried to downplay the whole situation at the time, publicly insisting that crypto-related demand was "small" and that gaming was the real bread and butter. Mining, he generously offered, was just "an extra bit of juice"—which, in hindsight, is like saying a meth lab is just "an extra bit of productivity" for your real estate portfolio.

The company even went so far as to create a dedicated crypto SKU chip specifically for miners, but here's the kicker: they reported those sales under the mining revenue segment anyway. Plaintiffs argue this sleight of hand was specifically designed to make investors believe that gaming and mining operations were kept neatly separated, like a good little regulated company. Spoiler: they were not.

Nvidia's legal team tried to argue that these statements weren't meant