Intel CEO Calls Bitcoin a ‘Climate Crisis’

Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger has criticized Bitcoin 's impact on the climate during a recent interview with Bloomberg. 

"A single ledger entry in Bitcoin consumes enough energy to power your house for almost a day," he said during the interview. "That's a climate crisis." 

Bitcoin's impact on the environment is already well documented. 

According to Cambridge University, the Bitcoin network currently consumes an estimated 125 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. That is more electricity consumption per year than most of the world's countries, including Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and Sweden. 

Previous research conducted by Decrypt also found that Bitcoin's wider carbon footprint was broadly equivalent to over 60 billion pounds of burned coal, 9 million homes' average electricity consumption for the year, or over 100 billion miles driven by an average passenger vehicle. 

During the interview, the CEO also took the opportunity to promote the firm's own mining chip, which Gelsinger himself described as one that will help "solve the climate issue" outlined above. 

Intel's foray into crypto mining

Gelsinger said Intel was about to bring forward its new mining chip that would be less harmful to the environment. 

Intel's senior vice president, Raja M. Koduri, said last week that this chip "has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining."

Intel is also expected to reveal more details about the energy-efficient chip at this year's International State Circuits Conference (ISCC). 

Thus, while Gelsinger's comments on Bitcoin's climate impact may appear as anti-crypto, he does remain optimistic on what he sees as the sector's underlying technological potential. 

"We're going to work on fixing this because this is a powerful technology, an immutable leverageable digitized entry system can transform currency, transactions, supply chains, so yeah, this one's exciting," said the CEO.