Speaking at the virtual 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference (via Seeking Alpha), Kress said that demand for Nvidia’s GeForce products far outweighed supply last year, as we know, but team green is optimistic that the situation will improve later this year. “We are working, as we’ve mentioned, in terms of longer-term, getting that supply. In the second half of calendar ‘22, we believe we’ll be in a great position with our overall supply in terms of our estimations of what we will need going forward,” Kress explained. Why the sudden increase in GPU supply? The obvious answer would be the arrival of Ampere’s successor, codenamed Lovelace—we previously heard that the new series of cards would arrive in the third quarter of 2022.
Expect these to be replaced with RTX 4000 cards later this year This is the second time Kress has claimed Nvidia would improve the supply of its graphics cards in the second half of 2022. At the UBS Global TMT conference last month, the CFO said, “The company as a whole will take the appropriate work to continue to procure more supply. We’ve been able to grow quite well during this year, each quarter, sequentially growing. And we do continue to plan to do that for Q4 […] So we believe we will be in a better situation in terms of supply when we look at the second half of next year.” Nvidia tends to release a new graphics card family every two years, so we can expect to see the RTX 4000 series in September if it follows that same cadence. Nvidia is rumored to be moving away from Samsung’s 8nm node, which it uses for the RTX 3000 series, and tap TSMC’s 5nm process node, used by Apple, AMD, and others. We’ll have to wait and see if there really is enough supply of RTX 4000 cards to meet consumer demand. TSMC recently committed to spending up to $44 billion on upgrading capacity this year, and lowering demand from miners is obviously a good thing, but scalpers aren’t going away anytime soon. Moreover, the supply of RTX 3000 cards could get even tighter if Nvidia puts more focus on producing its latest generation of products.