NVIDIA RTX 30-Series supplies might actually be worse this quarter

By Ewdison Then/Feb. 8, 2021 9:54 pm EST

Last year's final months were filled with drama in the tech and gaming industries, including companies hyping products to the point that demand far outstripped their ability to produce adequate supply. Of course, market dynamics are not exactly simple or clear-cut and NVIDIA promised that the shortage of its latest-gen RTX 30-Series GPUs would be resolved by the start of 2021. What it might not have said was that things might actually get worse before they get better, especially in the first quarter of the year.

Some considering high demand a good sign for a product but when the gap between demand and supply becomes too extreme, the scales then tip the other way. The NVIDIA RTX 30-Series should have been the company's biggest show of strength but now they have almost become proof of its inability to produce enough volume to satisfy the increasing number of orders and disgruntled buyers.

NVIDIA promised last year that things will start to look better starting 2021 but European hardware retailer Alternate reveals that it won't be happening this quarter. In fact, the shortage might actually take a turn for the worse, though, thankfully, it won't be staying that way for long.

To be fair, many of the factors that will lead to this worsening situation are beyond NVIDIA's control. The Chinese New Year, where companies in the country often close for a week or two, means that almost no new graphics cards will be produced during that period. While companies often take that annual event into account, the COVID-19 pandemic along with a general shortage of raw materials further up the supply chain, made the usual preparations ineffective.

Unfortunately, the demand for NVIDIA's newest graphics cards, along with other silicon-based products, isn't going down while production and supplies wait to reboot after February. Many orders remain open, especially for the more popular RTX 3080 and RTX 3060 Ti, and the use cases for GPUs, like cryptocurrency mining, only grow higher as time passes.