Compute power surrounding datacenter AI GPUs keeps growing at an extraordinary pace with each new GPU generation. This led a research team at Specops to test whether some popular AI GPUs could also perform well at password hacking, on the assumption that these GPUs will need a second job once the AI bubble finally bursts. The outlet put Nvidia's H200, AMD's MI300X, and Nvidia's RTX 5090 to see if really expensive $30,000 AI GPUs can outperform consumer graphics cards at password cracking.
The research team benchmarked five popular hashing algorithms, MD5, NTLM, bcrypt, SHA-256, and SHA-512, with the three aforementioned GPUs using Hashcat (a popular password recovery tool). Hashcat is designed to restore passwords from password hashes stored in a file as a starting point. Unsurprisingly, this tool is also used illegally by hackers to automate password cracking.
