Nvidia's new mining GPUs appears to have brought in three times the revenue in the first fiscal quarter of 2022 than the company had originally anticipated, indicating stronger demand for the card as graphics card stock struggles to meet soaring demand.
In a statement to investors this week, Nvidia announced that its fiscal Q1 2022 revenue was exceeding expectations, raising the company's anticipated revenue from its new crypto mining processors (CMPs) to $150 million (about £109.1 million / AU$196.3 million), up from $50 million (about £36.4 million / AU$65.3 million).
"Overall demand remains very strong and continues to exceed supply while our channel inventories remain quite lean," said Colette Kress, executive vice president and chief financial officer of NVIDIA. "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.”
The stronger than expected sales of the new Nvidia CMP cards may come as a surprise to many, especially considering that they don't seem to be available for purchase online and appear to be limited to special orders from industrial mining operations.
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Does this mean you can finally buy an RTX 3080?
While the stronger than expected sales of the new Nvidia CMPs might sound like good news – it is for Nvidia, at least – this doesn't mean that gamers are more likely to score a graphics card any time soon.
The hash rates for the new CMPs are rather low at the moment and appear to be built using existing inventories of Pascal-era GPUs like those found in the GTX 1660 Super, which are still used by many to mine cryptocurrencies.
Nonetheless, the prices we have seen online for some aftermarket CMPs from Gigabyte and Palit are still too high for them to be very profitable, and Nvidia doesn't list an MSRP for any of the CMPs that they have announced so far.
That means the strong sales of the CMPs might point more toward the absolute dearth of more powerful graphics card stock like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 than it does genuine interest from crypto miners for these new CMPs.
Unfortunately, that would mean that the demand for these CMPs would be quickly shifted to more powerful cards as stock becomes more available. And since Nvidia expects demand for graphics cards to outstrip supply for much of 2021, these CMPs are unlikely to do much to make it easier for gamers to get their hands on the new RTX cards.
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