What just happened? Nvidia has once again shared its belief about when the chip shortage will alleviate and graphics cards will stop being as valuable and rare as uncut diamonds. Team green says supply should improve in the second half of next year, which sounds slightly more optimistic than its previous prediction.
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress made the statement at the UBS Global TMT conference on Monday, reports PCMag. Kress spoke about the steps Nvidia was taking to improve the nightmarish graphics card situation caused mainly by the global chip shortage. “The company as a whole will take the appropriate work to continue to procure more supply,” she said. “We’ve been able to grow quite well during this year, each quarter, sequentially growing. And we do continue to plan to do that for Q4.”
Kress followed up with the part we’ve all been waiting for: “So we believe we will be in a better situation in terms of supply when we look at the second half of next year.”
Also read: GPU Availability and Pricing Update: November 2021
In August, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he expected graphics card issues to last throughout the vast majority of 2022. Kress does make it sound like things will improve sooner, though technically, the second half of next year could refer to December 2022. She also said it’s unclear when the “stabilization point,” where supply and demand even out, would be reached. “We’ll have to wait until we finish the holiday seasons to see how that inventory in the channel is looking,” she added.
Kress also suggested that Nvidia is doing more to ensure it holds onto extra manufacturing capacity and can increase production for future cards, such as the RTX 4000 series, by entering into longer-term commitments with partners. “Longer-term can be more than a year,” she said. “You’ve seen us now enter into agreements that will take us out many years in terms of long-term capacity needs.”
While improving supply will doubtlessly help matters, factors such as the ever-rising price of crypto and scalpers will continue to impact card availability and prices. Kress admitted that getting more GPUs on the market is the first step. "We'd love to bring that back down (the pricing). We believe bringing that down really just takes providing a reasonable amount of supply in the market versus the lean amounts that we have today.”
The latest report on the graphics card market shows prices for both Nvidia’s and AMD’s latest remain around double their MSRP—they’re getting pricier on eBay, too—and team red’s RX 6000 series looks set to become even more expensive. It’s led to PC makers selling pre-built gaming rigs without cards and criminals hijacking trucks to steal GPUs.
https://www.techspot.com/news/92526-nvidia-believes-graphics-card-supplies-improve-second-half.html
