Crypto Miners May be Responsible for RTX 3000 Shortages

Among the many consequences of the coronavirus epidemic, problems with the production of both games and hardware are neither last not least. It is precisely the complications associated with the restrictions imposed by the presence of COVID-19 that are supposed to result in poor availability of Nvidia's new graphics cards. At least officially, because Mitch Steves from RBC Capital Markets group points to another reason. According to the Barrons newspaper (via Bitcoin News), in the past fiscal quarter, Nvidia was sai to have sold at least $175 million worth of Ampere-based chipsets to entities affiliated with cryptocurrency mining.

Steves points out that the upcoming improvement of the Ethereum blockchain (commonly known as Ethereum 2.0) is expected to force crypto miners to switch to newer and more efficient hardware. These definitely include cards from the RTX 3000 family, as evidenced by reports from September (see Notebookcheck.net). Already then Chinese "investors" were said to have started collecting new GeForce GPUs, supposedly four times faster than their RTX 2000 series counterparts (via TechRadar).

Those willing to buy new GeForce must be patient.

Please note that so far Nvidia has not responded to the information provided by Barrons. In addition, it should be noted that $175 million is only a modest part of the company's $2.27 billion revenue in the gaming segment (as this category covers the sales of GPUs for crypto miners) in the third fiscal quarter. Nevertheless, it is still a huge number of new Nvidia chipsets, which in the context of the announced availability problems until next year may leave bad aftertaste. Moore's Law Is Dead channel on YouTube also points out that Mitch Steves' reports may explain the difference in the number of cards sent and delivered by Nvidia to the stores, which was spotted by the youtuber.

• Nvidia - official website