author: Witold Ciemierz
Joe Biden Wants to Know the Reason for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S Chip Shortage
The new US president, Joe Biden, has signed an executive order, which is expected to result in an investigation to explain the shortage of chips for the production of the PS5, Xbox Series X/S and GeForce RTX 3000 GPUs, among others.
- The 100-day review will look at the semiconductor, rare earth metals, battery and pharmaceutical markets;
- President Joe Biden wants to provide $37 billion in funding for a bill that will help boost chip production in the US;
- Once the first phase is completed, the plan is to "patch" identified holes in the supply chain.
For many months, whole crowds of gamers had to struggle with shortages of the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 GPUs or PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. This is due to several factors, but undoubtedly the most important is the problem with achieving and maintaining the volume of production of semiconductors at sufficient level to meet the demand. This in turn is quite large, because in addition to players it is generated by miners of Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH), and in the world of consoles scalpers have become a real nuisance. Biden administration wants to solve it.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday that will begin a 100-day review of supply chains for several key sectors, including those for the production of chips for GeForce and Radeon graphics cards and PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The goal is to find any gaps that are causing shortages at major manufacturers like AMD, Apple and Sony, and then put solutions in place. The president wants an additional $37 billion to achieve this.
According to data presented by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), American companies in the semiconductor sector account for only 12% of global chip production, with 47% share in global sales. There are voices that the United States should focus on re-increasing its production capacity and thus become independent from the rest of the world in this matter.
Although some may see this as an opportunity to improve the situation, it should be remembered that an important obstacle is still the pandemic, and thus the risk of production stopping as a result of further lockdowns. An additional threat is also the dependence of supply chains on China, with which the United States has strained relations, unlikely to change soon.