Bad news for graphics card buyers. Nvidia’s CEO is predicting the great GPU shortage will persist through this year and for most of 2022.
“I would expect that we will see a supply constrained environment for the vast majority of next year is my guess at the moment,” said Jensen Huang during an earnings call on Thursday.
“A lot of that has to do with the demand being so great,” he added. Surprisingly, Huang didn’t blame cryptocurrency miners for buying up the GPU supplies. Instead, he pointed to how millions of PC gamers are still hoping to upgrade to an RTX 3000, which uses the company’s Ampere architecture.
“Ampere is off to an incredible start. It’s the best selling GPU architecture in the history of our company,” Huang said. “And yet, we’ve only upgraded less than 20 percent of our total install base. So there’s another 80 percent of the world’s PC gaming market that we have yet to upgrade to RTX.”
That said, Nvidia has been trying to dissuade cryptocurrency miners from taking supplies away from consumers. In February, the company began implementing an Ethereum mining limiter starting on the RTX 3060 before expanding it to other graphics cards.
These “Lite Hash Rate” or LHR GPU models made up over 80 percent of all shipments for the RTX 3000 series in fiscal Q2, which ended August 1st, according to Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress. Nevertheless, Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards still remain hard to buy.
Not only are consumers trying to obtain the cards, but also scalper-run bots. The graphics cards are then resold on sites such as eBay, where they can go for double the normal price. Kress added the supply constraints are also ensnaring notebooks built with RTX 3000 discrete GPUs.
But despite the shortage, Nvidia said it’s still secured enough supplies to ensure the company reaches its growth plans for next year. For this past Q2, the company’s revenue from gaming was up 85 percent year-over-year, resulting in $3 billion in sales.