Given the demand, you would think that the production of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 graphics cards would be increasing. But PC vendor Asus says they are still in short supply, leading to higher prices.
Last week, Asus held an event for investors, where executives projected revenues for the first quarter of this year. Surprisingly, the PC vendor is predicting that component sales – which include Asus RTX 3000 video cards – will fall by 5 to 10% from the fourth quarter of last year.
“When it comes to the video card, the main problem today is the lack of Nvidia (GPU) shipments, so there is a situation of supply restriction. Due to a lack of supplies, prices are rising, ”said Asus Co-CEO, SY Hsu. “Everyone is struggling to get units.”
Hsu added that it is difficult to assess when the scarcity will end. But he blamed part of the blame on lower-than-expected yields from Nvidia’s manufacturing partner, Samsung, which has been producing GPU chips for the RTX 3000 cards.
“At the moment, we speculate that the upstream supplier’s performance has not been good,” said Hsu during the event. “This led to a major shortage.”
The other bad news is that Asus may further increase the prices of the company’s graphics cards during the first half of this year, citing the continuing shortage of supplies. The company had previously raised prices in January, pointing to rising costs for components, manufacturing and Trump-era tariffs coming back into effect. As a result, the Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 is now priced at $ 1,069, compared to $ 729 when it launched.
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However, the company is only one of several GPU vendors. The others include Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA and Zotac, among others. Therefore, Asus’ perspective may not be representative of the entire industry. However, we have seen sales of PC video cards for the past six months and the products remain out of stock at all major retailers. What’s not helping is how professional cryptocurrency miners have been buying the cards, taking supplies away from consumers. This gave exchanges an opportunity to charge absurdly high prices for RTX 3000 cards on eBay.
Nvidia declined to comment. Hsu’s comments were spoken in Chinese Mandarin and translated by this journalist into English.