Bad news: The shortage for Nvidia’s RTX 3000 graphics cards may persist throughout 2021, according to Nvidia.
“We expect demand to continue to exceed supply for much of this year,” CFO Colette Kress said during Nvidia's annual investors day on Monday.
On the plus side, Kress said Nvidia is making progress on pumping out more GPUs, despite the ongoing chip shortage. “Our operations team is agile and executing fantastically. We expect our supplies to increase as the year progresses,” she added.
In November, Nvidia predicted it might only take a “few months” for product availability to catch up with demand. Unfortunately, the supplies have yet to improve. The RTX 3000 cards continue to remain out of stock at all the major retailers; when new inventory does arrive, scalper-run bots snatch them up in seconds.
However, Kress said the increase in GPU supplies will occur this current quarter. So with any luck, the products might be a little easier to buy in the coming weeks and months. But don’t hold your breath. Unless the supplies drastically improve, we expect scalpers will continue to try and snatch up the cards, and then resell them for ridiculous prices on eBay.
The other problem facing the market has been cryptocurrency miners, who’ve been buying up the GPUs. In response, Nvidia released a dedicated line of mining graphics cards known as CMP, which professional cryptocurrency miners are starting to buy, Kress indicated.
“We now expect CMP revenue to be approximately $150 million, higher than the $50 million included in our fiscal Q1 outlook,” she said on Monday during the event. “Up side to CMP is not displacing supply from our other platforms. It is incremental.”