If you’re still struggling to get a good next-gen GPU — not to mention one for a reasonable price — well, Nvidia has some bad news.
After promising that the GPU shortages might actually be resolved in a quarter or three, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is now telling investors that the supply shortage might carry on for way longer than that. In the latest quarterly earnings for Nvidia, investors naturally wanted to know when silicon supply might return to more reasonable levels.
But rather than suggesting things might get better by the end of this quarter, or even the end of this year, the Nvidia CEO did a NSW and skipped over the rest of 2021 entirely. Here’s the transcript of the call, courtesy of Seeking Alpha:
And so there’s a whole bunch of reasons when choosing referenced revenues while we’re on supply constraints. We have enough supply to meet our second-half Company growth plans. And next year, we expect to be able to achieve our Company’s growth plans for next year.
Meanwhile, we’re having and are securing pretty significant long-term supply commitments as we expand into all these different marketing initiatives that we’ve set ourselves up for. And so I would expect that we will see a supply-constrained environment for the vast majority of next year is my guess at the moment.
Well, fuck.
As an indication of just how far the needle has shifted on this, here’s Nvidia chief financial officer Colette Kress back in December talking about when they expected GPU supplies to return back to earth.
“We do have supply constraints and our supply constraints do expand pass what we’re seeing in terms of wafers and silicon, but yes some constrains are in substrates and components. We continue to work during the quarter on our supply and we believe though that demand will probably exceed supply in Q4 for overall gaming.”
And this was Kress in January, at the CES Tech Investor Forum:
Gaming demand is off the charts. Our overall Ampere architecture and ray tracing are really a true success. 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.
So if you were hoping to get your hands on a RTX 3080 at anywhere close to its original MSRP, forget about it — you might as well wait for the next generation of cards at this point. Unless you really can’t wait and you don’t mind paying … checks notes … $1900 or more. Those prices might come down by 2022, but by then it’s expected we’ll have RDNA 3 cards from AMD, Nvidia’s RTX 40-series GPUs and Intel’s DG2 graphics cards.
Although they’ll probably get gouged to the high heavens, too.
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