The larger miners are using something called an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Hobbyist retail miners use gpus. the big farms you see in new or

The larger miners are using something called an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Hobbyist retail miners use gpus. the big farms you see in new organization photos are using silicon explicitly built for btc mining and only btc mining. Or a handful of proof of work algorithms. But still specialized. The functionality is burned into the silicon at the factory and cannot be changed. There are also specialized devices that can give you the benefits of an asic and can also be changed and reprogrammed. these are called field programmable gate arrays (fpgas). Large scale miners do not use gpus or fpgas due to cost and efficiency reasons.