There’s some good news for graphics card buyers: Nvidia says its increased investments in manufacturing should boost GPU supplies throughout the year.
"While revenue was gated by supply, we anticipate improving capacity in coming quarters, which should allow us to serve with significant customer demands we're seeing,” Nvidia CFO Colete Kress said during a Wednesday earnings call.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang added: “We expanded our supply chain footprint significantly this year to prepare us for both increased supply base and supply availability in each one of the quarters going forward, but also in preparation for some really exciting product launches.”
The upcoming launches will likely include the RTX 4000 series, next-generation desktop graphics cards set to replace the current RTX 3000 lineup. Expect Nvidia to announce the new GPUs later this year, likely around September.
In the meantime, the company has been pouring billions into shoring up GPU manufacturing, which Nvidia has said should lead to “substantially” better supplies during this year’s second half. But before you celebrate, the improved inventories may not necessarily translate into an easier time buying a PC graphics card.
The other problem facing the market is inflated pricing for GPUs. Even normal retail pricing for Nvidia’s RTX 3000 cards have gone up over the past year due to high demand, thanks in part to cryptocurrency miners. At the same time, scalpers and bots continue to snap up GPU supplies, depriving regular consumers of a chance to buy them.
Still, Nvidia expects the increased GPU manufacturing will help drive down the costs. “We believe bringing that down (the pricing) really just takes providing a reasonable amount of supply in the market versus the lean amounts that we have today," Kress said in December.
Rival AMD also expects its own GPU supplies to improve in this year's second half.