Nvidia: No magic cure for chip shortages in 2022

Nvidia has bad news for anyone hoping that the GPU chip shortage will soon be a thing of the past: the delivery problems will apparently continue into the coming year.

The latest from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang comes from an interview with Yahoo Finance, where he noted, “I think demand will be much greater than supply in the coming year. We don’t have a panacea in struggling through the supply chain.”

So, broadly speaking, we can expect 2022 to be a lot like 2021 in the sense that there won’t be enough graphics cards for everyone. The stock shortages will lead to scalping and the associated absurdly high prices. Bweh.

At the moment, for example, you’ll struggle to find an RTX 3080 unless you want to buy a complete PC with one of these GPUs in it (which is pricey, of course). And the same is generally true for other RTX 3000 models. The fact that the demand for video cards will be higher than the supply for a long time to come does not help prices. Certainly not with increased demand at this time of year (and with Black Friday in sight).

Analysis: General consensus among CEOs and analysts is downright bleak

This is the latest statement in a series of bleak forecasts indicating that chip and component supply issues will continue to be a bottleneck for the entire tech industry in the coming year.

Intel’s Pat Gelsinger recently claimed in a CNBC interview in October that the “demand-supply balance” won’t be back in balance until 2023. Toshiba, along with IBM and TSMC, have made similar predictions.

Lisa Su, CEO of Nvidia and Intel’s arch-rival AMD, was a little more optimistic in September when she hinted that things may change later in 2022 — although any improvement is still a drop in the ocean with a year of sales to fill. to fetch.

If Nvidia and other manufacturers are right, and the problems persist until 2022, it will hinder the launch of its next-gen ‘Lovelace’ graphics cards, which are rumored to debut sometime in Q3 next year. These GPUs are expected to deliver great performance. If that expectation is met, prices will likely be in line with available production. And those prices are bound to be high, with availability issues and the aforementioned scalpers reselling the products for a hefty profit.

Our best hope is that these CEOs make pessimistic statements so as not to create false hopes for a speedy recovery, but given the overall tendency of these statements by executives and analyst firms, things really don’t look good for 2022.