Nvidia admits its horrible GPU shortage will continue throughout 2021

By Jacob Roach April 13, 2021

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Amid announcements about the RTX Studio lineup and RTX graphics coming to Chromebooks on Monday, Nvidia held its first investors meeting for fiscal 2022. During the call, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress touched on the GPU shortage that has plagued the market since late last year. And the outlook isn’t good.

“Overall demand remains very strong and continues to exceed supply while our channel inventories remain quite lean. We expect demand to continue to exceed supply for much of this year,” Kress explained in a blog post.

Ampere’s launch has been very successful for Nvidia, driving Nvidia’s gaming division to new revenue heights. Kress explained that Nvidia believes that it has “sufficient supply to support sequential growth beyond Q1,” but that doesn’t mean it will be any easier getting a graphics card. It just means Nvidia has enough stock to sell more graphics cards than it did last quarter, and with demand still surging, that shouldn’t be an issue.

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Stock shortages are only one part of the complex GPU shortage puzzle. Hefty tariffs on PC components have driven up the cost of the entire Ampere line, and manufacturer TSMC is still struggling to meet demand. Combine those issues with a thriving scalping market and mobs of miners and gamers looking for the latest releases, and the state of the GPU market starts to become to clear.

Nvidia didn’t talk about what it’s doing to address these problems during the investor call. The good news is that Nvidia has as much or more stock than it did last quarter, and although it’s hard to find a GPU, they’re still arriving in the hands of gamers. Once supply chains rebuild from the coronavirus, the best hope for gamers is that the crypto bubble eventually bursts and scalpers move on to the next shiny tech product. Regardless, it looks like the GPU market won’t turn the corner until late 2021, at the earliest.

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Senior Staff Writer, Computing

Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he…

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