In a press release, NVIDIA announced that is apparently starting to change their GPUs to reduce their Ethereum hash rate and hence try to prevent them from being used for crypto mining.
The Financial Times notes how the technology has been appropriated for crypto mining, causing shortages for video-gamers:
Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, were first designed to handle the demands of rendering video images in real time, a challenge given the large amount of data that needs to be processed simultaneously. The same technology has since been adapted to become the workhouse of artificial intelligence, one of the most data-intensive computing tasks, as well as crypto mining.
As the FT further points out, NVIDIA created a new line of chips called Cryptocurrency Mining Processors.