Nvidia believes the global chip shortage won’t experience an improvement in the near future, with supply issues expected to continue throughout 2022.
The GPU giant’s CEO, Jensen Huang, shared his expectations on the outlook for next year’s inventory levels with Yahoo Finance. “I think that through the next year, demand is going to far exceed supply. We don’t have any magic bullets in navigating the supply chain,” he said.
Still, due to immense demand, the bottom lines for chip manufacturers have seen record highs. AMD, for example, recorded its best financial quarter ever in its third quarter of 2021.
Moving forward, Nvidia is seemingly also confident its financial performance will remain healthy.
“We have the support of our suppliers. We’re fortunate that we’re multi-sourced and that our supply chain is diverse and our company is quite large so we have the support of a large ecosystem around us,” Huang added.
While Huang doesn’t envision an end to the chip shortage next year, AMD CEO Lisa Su has a more optimistic view; she expects the situation to improve during the second half of 2022. However, Intel believes a supply-demand balance won’t be achieved until 2023 at the earliest.
The chip shortage has been compounded by recent supply chain issues that have shown no signs of improvement. Multiple industries have been severely impacted by the lack of inventory for products, most notably GPUs and gaming consoles. For both categories, scalpers have exploited the current state of affairs, which has inevitably resulted in considerable price increases across the board.
To make matters worse, due to the record highs seen in cryptocurrency lately, GPUs have become an extremely valuable commodity for miners, making it even more difficult for the average consumer to get their hands on a graphics card. One individual in particular was subject to a yearlong wait for his order of an RTX 3080, which was only expedited after he sent a cake.
Elsewhere, because of the component shortages, Valve’s highly anticipated Steam Deck portable gaming console has been delayed by months. Sony, meanwhile, was reportedly forced to reduce its PlayStation 5 production targets due to manufacturing limitations.
We’re well over a year into the GPU shortage, and given the general consensus on when it will last until, gamers will have to wait yet another year before supply issues normalize.
