If you were anticipating that the GPU shortage would be over soon, you might want to brace yourself for a long wait. While there are signs that the semiconductor shortfall is lessening, some industry insiders believe it will be a long time before supply can fully catch up with demand.
Nvidia predicted early this year that the severe GPU shortage would extend through 2021, and the company now predicts that supply concerns will last well into 2022. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he expects supply restrictions for the majority of next year during the company’s Q2 fiscal 2022 earnings call this week.
“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 Huang according to a transcript of the call, spotted by Videocardz. Nvidia has committed to securing long-term supply commitments, but demand is still higher than supply right now during a global chip shortage.
However, Nvidia’s predictions of a GPU scarcity well beyond 2022 may not be as dire as they appear. Anecdotally, we’ve noticed Nvidia resupplying a range of its GPUs in Europe and the United States more frequently in recent weeks than we’ve seen since the RTX 30-series arrived last year.
AMD’s RX 6600 XT GPUs have also recently sold at or below their suggested retail price, with plenty of stock still available at UK stores. It’s still not easy to go out and get the precise GPU you want, but it appears that things are improving significantly.
Despite the shortages, Nvidia generated a record $6.51 billion in revenue this quarter, rising 68 percent year over year. Gaming accounted for $3.06 billion of Nvidia’s total revenue, increasing 85 percent from the previous year. To tackle cryptomining demand, the business is now shipping the majority (80%) of its PC gaming GPUs with its Lite Hash Rate enabled.
While Nvidia’s gaming division is certainly booming, the company’s new Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) has fallen short of Nvidia’s own expectations. CMP only made $266 million in revenue, far less than the $400 million forecasted by the business. CMP sales are believed to have been impacted by China’s cryptocurrency crackdown, with miners selling off used GPUs.
While it’s safe to imagine that supply will take a long time to catch up to demand, supply will become more readily available as time goes on. To put it another way, the shortfall will ease over time until supply meets demand and GPUs are widely available.
Of course, for someone who has been trying to buy one of NVIDIA’s new cards for months with no luck, the concept that the shortage will gradually improve isn’t very comforting right now. In any event, as we get closer to 2022, we’ll see if Huang’s forecast comes true, so stay tuned for more.
