Over this past week, Ethereum has skyrocketed to nearly $1700 in value (at the time of writing), making Ethereum very profitable to mine once again. But due to the shortage in graphics card supplies right now, desperate Chinese miners are apparently turning to RTX 30 series laptops as a new way to mine the cryptocurrency, as shown in a series of images that depict a laptop mining farm. 

It’s unclear from the images and description if the miner purchased the laptops specifically for mining ethereum or is just repurposing laptops from a company or school, like an internet cafe, while they would otherwise be idle. 

In another demonstration of how valuable Ethereum has become, a vlogger posted on Bilibili that she went to a local Starbucks in China with an RTX 3060 laptop (TDP unknown), and showcased showed her payout from mining Ethereum for just two hours. She claims that her RTX 3060 mobile with a hefty memory overclock of +1000MHz managed an average hashing rate of 46MH/s. After two hours, she claims she made $0.9 USD. That might not sound like much, but it was enough for her to buy a coffee at Starbucks.

Now stack dozens or even hundreds of these laptops together and have them mining 24/7, and you can get an idea of why Chinese miners are so eager to push any Ampere laptop they can find into mining service.

Unfortunately, if prices for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum continue to climb, miners will be back in full swing and ordering as much compute power as they can. Now that getting graphics cards is nearly impossible for your average gamer or miner, it leaves miners no choice but to look for alternative methods to mine coins.