New financial analysis suggests the Nvidia RTX 3000 ongoing shortages could be pinned on crypto miners

It is easy to blame the global pandemic for most of the problems plaguing the IT&C sectors right now, but sometimes the causes are not that clear-cut and could hide some complicated behind-the-scenes machinations. Take for example Nvidia’s RTX 3000 supply shortages. The skimpy launch stocks from mid-September have not really gotten any better to this date, and Team Green itself acknowledged that the problems could continue for at least a few more months. Analysts pointed out that the awful Samsung 8 nm yields may also have something to do with the shortages, and Nvidia is apparently looking to bypass this by moving part of the RTX 3000 GPU production on TSMC’s 7 nm nodes. However, the latest word on the street is that Nvidia had decent RTX 3000 launch stocks, but chose to sell most of those cards directly to crypto miners.

This is coming from financial analysts writing for Barron’s and RBC Capital Markets, who claim that Nvidia managed to sell at least $175 million worth of RTX 3000 cards directly to miners, and this would be reflected in the strong 37% YoY growth reported with the last quarter’s earnings. Apparently, the Ampere-based GPUs are quite the upgrade over the Turing models when it comes to mining Ethereum. RBC Capital  Markets analyst Mitch Steves further points out that: “...the upcoming network upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain, also known as Ethereum 2.0, which is scheduled to take place sometime in December, demands that miners switch over to more efficient mining hardware. Nvidia’s new Ampere GPU chips are thought to meet that need.” If this crypto mining premise is proven true, we suspect the miner sales may have happened weeks before the actual launch date in mid-September.

We are also hearing that AMD’s new RDNA2 cards are not really that better compared to the RDNA1 RX 5700 XT models launched back in mid-2019, plus the incoming Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is said to be faster than the RX 6900 XT from AMD. This could redirect gamers towards Team Red’s new RDNA2 cards in the coming months, provided that the RX 6000 supply issues get fixed in the meantime. Nvidia fans, on the other hand, may be left with a fat lip, as even the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 models that were touted to have more plentiful supplies could get scalped by miners.

Buy it now on Amazon - EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming Graphics Card