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Nvidia GPU stock shortages to continue until March

Nvidia GPU stock shortages to continue until March

Hardware specialist Nvidia says that it'll be hard to get your hands on its GPU stock until Q1.

That's according to the company's chief financial officer (CFO) Colette Kress speaking at the Annual JP Morgan Tech and Auto Forum Conference – as reported by Seeking Alpha – who said that demand for gaming GPUs had been "off the charts."

"Our overall Ampere architecture and ray tracing are really a true success," Kress said.

"This demand has remained stronger for longer. Okay? So, supply does remain tight at this time. We expect the overall channel inventories, meaning the inventories that are with our AIC partners as well as in our e-tail and retail channels will likely remain lean throughout Q1. Our overall capacity has not been able to keep up with that overall strong demand that we have seen. We’ve seen in terms of constraints, constraints really from the overall global surge of compute and the overall capacity, capacity that may be necessary for assembly and test and/or sub trades as well. But again, we remain focused on this and working each day to improve our overall supply situation."

Kress also said that Nvidia couldn't see how much of the demand for the RTX 30 series of cards was due to cryptocurrency, which has seen a surge in valuation in recent weeks.

"We don’t have visibility on how much of the RTX 30 Series end demand comes from mining," she said.

"So, we don’t believe it’s a big part of our business today. Gaming demand is very strong, and we think that’s larger than our current supply. This time feels different than what we had seen several years ago for a couple of reasons. One, inventory levels are now very lean, and we have better visibility into that channel inventory, something that we are monitoring on a periodic basis and often to make sure we have an understanding where that inventory is in the world."

The RTX 30 line of GPUs was announced in September 2020 but demand has been in short supply since it was rolled out. Initially, CEO Jensen Huang said that shortages would last until the end of 2020 but it's clear it is continuing until the end of March.


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PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.