In a briefing with press and industry analysts, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke about the ongoing graphics card shortages and how it has affected the market. Huang once again clarified that the shortages were primarily the result of increased demand and component scarcity rather than limited supply. He went on to say that the prices are inflating near the end of the retail supply chains, at retail stores (partly because consumers are willing to pay the surplus to get their hands on the products).
As far as when the prices will return to normal, there’s not much hope in that regard. Jensen stated that the production of the updated Ampere graphics cards is increasing and into the second half of the year, we should see improved pricing and better supply. The introduction of the CMP lineup is also being touted as a “gamer-friendly” measure rather than a means to avoid a crypto-hangover.
The NVIDIA CEO believes that cryptocurrencies are here to stay, and it’d be better to provide alternatives to miners rather than wait for the boom to phase out. Either way, in a market where GPUs are priced at 2-3x higher than their retail MSRPs any new launches don’t really mean much to the end-consumer, and it’ll be a fair amount of time before we see any notable changes. We’ll update this post if we hear more regarding the semiconductor shortages.
