NVIDIA told investors it expects supply to fall short of demand for ‘much of this year’.
The statement to investors on Monday included the following:
“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. We believe we will have sufficient supply to support sequential growth beyond Q1”
NVIDIA’s tone was positive overall, reporting Q1 revenue for fiscal year 2022 as “tracking above its previously provided outlook, with outperformance in each of its market platforms“.
The supply shortage is more bad news for Oculus Quest owners looking to get into PC VR, or existing PC gamers looking to upgrade their rig for the latest titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator.
NVIDIA launched its ‘Ampere’ latest range of graphics cards all the way back in September, but availability has remained severely limited.
This isn’t a specifically NVIDIA problem. Companies like NVIDIA and Qualcomm design their own chips, but the actual production of most chips is done by a handful of companies with fabrication plants (fabs). TSMC, Samsung Electronics, and GlobalFoundries, account for the vast majority.
The semiconductor shortage has affected most electronics, from cars to games consoles.
There is no single cause, but one major contributing factor was car manufacturers incorrectly predicting a drop in demand at the start of the pandemic. Those companies have been scrambling for chips to meet demand for new cars. As people around the world spend more time at home, demand for consumer electronics has been rising steadily. Supply just can’t keep up.
As process nodes continue get smaller and manufacturing techniques get more advanced, the cost & time needed to scale up production keeps rising. Analysts expect the problem to continue to get worse for some of 2021, and perhaps even into 2022.
Are you finding it hard to purchase a graphics card? Let us know in the comments.
