Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced on Monday that the demand for Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 graphics cards has been so intense that manufacturers cannot keep up with it, creating shortages that are going to last into 2021.
According to Tom's Hardware, Huang revealed the projected shortage during a press Q&A during Nvidia's GTC announcement.
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"I believe that demand will outstrip all of our supply through the year," he said. "Remember, we're also going into the double-whammy. The double-whammy is the holiday season. Even before the holiday season, we were doing incredibly well, and then you add on top of it the ‘Ampere factor,’ and then you add on top of that the ‘Ampere holiday factor,’ and we're going to have a really really big Q4 season."
Huang said that the problem wasn't on the supplier side of the equation but on the consumer side – as in, everybody with a PC chomping at the bit to get their hands on one of the new Ampere cards.
"The 3080 and 3090 have a demand issue, not a supply issue," he said. "The demand issue is that it is much much greater than we expected – and we expected really a lot."
An RTX 3070 shortage is almost certain as well. Can AMD capitalize?
While the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 is sold out nearly as fast as retailers are able to restock, the upcoming RTX 3070 release is looking even more likely to suffer a similar fate as its bigger Ampere siblings.
With shortages of RTX 3080s and 3090s stretching on for months, all those empty-handed consumers are that much more tempted to try and buy the RTX 3070 when it goes on sale in the coming weeks, creating the same selling-out-within-seconds dynamic that are currently plaguing both the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3090.
With the shortage of Nvidia cards all but set in stone for the next few months, there does seem to be an opening of sorts for Team Red to fill all those empty online shopping carts with their RX 6000 Big Navi cards set to be announced on October 28.
With the graphics cards going on sale in advance of Black Friday, AMD could very well be a compromise option for a lot of buyers, assuming that their Big Navi cards can hold their own against the new RTX 3000 series. And if they're competitive on price as well, Nvidia's shortage could be AMD's windfall – at least in the short term.
